Related papers: What is the Perfect Shuffle?
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…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
When we want to simulate the realization of a symmetric simple random walk on $\mathbb Z^d$, we use $(2d)$-side fair dice to decide to which neighbor it jumps at each step if $d\geq 2$ or we simply use a fair coin when $d=1$. Assume that…
The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…
Secure multi-party computation using a deck of playing cards has been a subject of research since the "five-card trick" introduced by den Boer in 1989. One of the main problems in card-based cryptography is to design committed-format…
Consider the interchange process on a connected graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices. I.e.\ shuffle a deck of cards by first placing one card at each vertex of $G$ in a fixed order and then at each tick of the clock, picking an edge uniformly at…
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
In this paper, we investigate the mixing time of the adjacent transposition shuffle for a deck of $N$ cards. We prove that around time $N^2\log N/(2\pi^2)$, the total variation distance to equilibrium of the deck distribution drops abruptly…
A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
In the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle, a deck of $N$ cards is cut into two approximately equal parts which are then riffled uniformly at random. Bayer and Diaconis famously showed that this Markov chain undergoes cutoff in total variation…
Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…
We study Markov chains which model genome rearrangements. These models are useful for studying the equilibrium distribution of chromosomal lengths, and are used in methods for estimating genomic distances. The primary Markov chain studied…
In this paper, we study the biased random transposition shuffle, a natural generalization of the classical random transposition shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani. We diagonalize the transition matrix of the shuffle and use these…
Computer calculations for most exact expected values in blackjack have been available since the 1960's, but exact results for pair splitting and resplitting have previously been too computer intensive. This paper describes a new algorithm…
To keep card sorting with a lot of cards concise, a common strategy for gauging mental models involves presenting participants with fewer randomly selected cards instead of the full set. This is a decades-old practice, but its effects…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
The graph reconstruction conjecture asserts that every simple graph on at least three vertices is uniquely determined by its deck of vertex-deleted subgraphs. In this expository article we survey the conjecture and present an…
Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…