Related papers: Unshuffling a deck of cards

The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…

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…

A 2-switch is an edge addition/deletion operation that changes adjacencies in the graph while preserving the degree of each vertex. A well known result states that graphs with the same degree sequence may be changed into each other via…

Let $X=(V,E)$ be a finite simple connected graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. A configuration is an assignment of one of two colors, black or white, to each edge of $X.$ A move applied to a configuration is to select a black edge…

We consider a card guessing strategy for a stack of cards with two different types of cards, say $m_1$ cards of type red (heart or diamond) and $m_2$ cards of type black (clubs or spades). Given a deck of $M=m_1+m_2$ cards, we propose a…

Consider a finite sequence of permutations of the elements 1,...,n, with the property that each element changes its position by at most 1 from any permutation to the next. We call such a sequence a tangle, and we define a move of element i…

We propose a novel mathematical framework to address the problem of automatically solving large jigsaw puzzles. This problem assumes a large image, which is cut into equal square pieces that are arbitrarily rotated and shuffled, and asks to…

As in the $(k,l)$-RSK (Robinson-Schensted-Knuth) of [1], other super-RSK algorithms can be applied to sequences of variables from the set $\{t_1,...,t_k,u_1,...,u_l\}$, where $t_1<...<t_k$, and $u_1<...<u_l$. While the $(k,l)$-RSK of [1] is…

In this expository article, we discuss the rank-derangement problem, which asks for the number of permutations of a deck of cards such that each card is replaced by a card of a different rank. This combinatorial problem arises in computing…

The *somewhere-to-below shuffles* are the elements \[ t_{\ell} := \operatorname{cyc}_{\ell}+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1}+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1,\ell+2}+\cdots+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1,\ldots,n} \] (for $\ell \in…

We study the perfect matching reconfiguration problem: Given two perfect matchings of a graph, is there a sequence of flip operations that transforms one into the other? Here, a flip operation exchanges the edges in an alternating cycle of…

Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…

Define a permutation to be any sequence of distinct positive integers. Given two permutations p and s on disjoint underlying sets, we denote by p sh s the set of shuffles of p and s (the set of all permutations obtained by interleaving the…

Cluster automorphisms have been shown to have links to the mapping class groups of surfaces, maximal green sequences and to exchange graph automorphisms for skew-symmetric cluster algebras. In this paper we aim to generalise these results…

Let $E$ be an elliptic curve over $\mathbf{Q}$. We conjecture asymptotic estimates for the number of vanishings of $L(E,1,\chi)$ as $\chi$ varies over all primitive Dirichlet characters of orders 4 and 6, subject to a mild hypothesis on…

We prove that for any $n$ there is a pair $(P_1 ^n , P_2 ^n )$ of nonisomorphic ordered sets such that $P_1 ^n $ and $P_2 ^n $ have equal maximal and minimal decks, equal neighborhood decks, and there are $n+1$ ranks $k_0 , \ldots , k_n $…

Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…

Relying on the optimal guessing strategy recently found for a no-feedback card guessing game with $k$-time riffle shuffles, we derive an exact, closed-form formula for the expected number of correct guesses and higher moments for a $1$-time…

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…

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…