Related papers: The 21 Card Trick and its Generalization
The localization game is a variant of the game of Cops and Robber in which the robber is invisible and moves between adjacent vertices, but the cops can probe any $k$ vertices of the graph to obtain the distance between probed vertices and…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
We consider a problem of shuffling a deck of cards with ordered labels. Namely we split the deck of N=k^tq cards (where t>=1 is maximal) into k equally sized stacks and then take the top card off of each stack and sort them by the order of…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
In this paper, we calculate a basic strategy for several variations of a simplified version of Blackjack. In short, for these variants the player has only the two options of hit or stand, and they may only make either decision once. Other…
There is no trivial mathematics, there are only trivial mathematicians! A mathematician is trivial if he or she believes that there exists trivial mathematics. Being a non-trivial mathematician myself, I will describe ten different proofs…
The paper aims to investigate the degree of cognitive skills required for success in online versions of the popular card game rummy and poker. The study focuses on analyzing the impact of experience and learnable skills on success in the…
We illustrate how one can use basic combinatorial theory and computer programming technique (Python) to analyze the combinatorial game: Mahjong. The results confirm some folklore concerning the game, and expose some unexpected results.…
Card-based cryptography is a research area that realizes cryptographic protocols such as secure computation by applying shuffles to sequences of cards that encode input values. A single-cut full-open protocol is one that obtains an output…
In trick-taking card games, a two-step process of state sampling and evaluation is widely used to approximate move values. While the evaluation component is vital, the accuracy of move value estimates is also fundamentally linked to how…
Contract bridge is a game characterized by incomplete information, posing an exciting challenge for artificial intelligence methods. This paper proposes the BridgeHand2Vec approach, which leverages a neural network to embed a bridge…
Anyone who has tried to memorize a one-hundred-digit number can attest that the human brain acquires abstract information slowly. However, following a three-decade increase of results at memory competitions, the best competitors manage to…
A magic SET square is a 3 by 3 table of SET cards such that each row, column, diagonal, and anti-diagonal is a set. We allow the following transformations of the square: shuffling features, shuffling values within the features, rotations…
In the paper we discuss how to share the secrets, that are graphs. So, far secret sharing schemes were designed to work with numbers. As the first step, we propose conditions for "graph to number" conversion methods. Hence, the existing…
The problem of $A$ privately transmitting information to $B$ by a public announcement overheard by an eavesdropper $C$ is considered. To do so by a deterministic protocol, their inputs must be correlated. Dependent inputs are represented…
In 1998, Ciucu published "No-feedback card guessing for dovetail shuffles", an article which gives the optimal guessing strategy for $n$ cards ($n$ even) after $k$ riffle shuffles whenever $k>2\log_{2}\left(n\right)$. We discuss in this…