Related papers: Card Tricks and Information
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
We show that the cop number of any graph on 18 or fewer vertices is at most 3. This answers a question posed by Andreae in 1986, as well as more recently by Baird et al. We also find all 3-cop-win graphs on 11 vertices, narrow down the…
The game "Spot It!" is played with a deck of cards in which every pair of cards has exactly one matching symbol and the aim is to be the fastest at finding the match. It is known that finite projective planes correspond to decks in which…
In this paper, we study some cards shuffles which are used by magicians. We focus ourselves on the possibility to hit eventually the initial state after several shuffles. This is a classical problem arising in discrete dynamical systems.…
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…
We consider the following game. A deck with $m$ copies of each of $n$ distinct cards is shuffled in a perfectly random way. The Guesser sequentially guesses the card from top to bottom. After each guess, the Guesser is informed whether the…
A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has…
Strategy card game is a well-known genre that is demanding on the intelligent game-play and can be an ideal test-bench for AI. Previous work combines an end-to-end policy function and an optimistic smooth fictitious play, which shows…
Here we introduce a new game on graphs, called cup stacking, following a line of what can be considered as $0$-, $1$-, or $2$-person games such as chip firing, percolation, graph burning, zero forcing, cops and robbers, graph pebbling, and…
We study a game of pursuit and evasion introduced by Seager in 2012, in which a cop searches the robber from outside the graph, using distance queries. A graph on which the cop wins is called locatable. In her original paper, Seager asked…
This is a photographic dataset collected for testing image processing algorithms. The idea is to have images that can exploit the properties of total variation, therefore a set of playing cards was distributed on the scene. The dataset is…
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…
The overhand shuffle is one of the ``real'' card shuffling methods in the sense that some people actually use it to mix a deck of cards. A mathematical model was constructed and analyzed by Pemantle [J. Theoret. Probab. 2 (1989) 37--49] who…
In this article, we present a trick around Fibonacci numbers which can be found in several magic books. It consists in computing quickly the sum of the successive terms of a Fibonacci-like sequence. We give explanations and extensions of…
Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…
Poker is one of the most popular card games, whose rational investigation represents also one of the major challenges in several scientific areas, spanning from information theory and artificial intelligence to game theory and statistical…
We examine the advantages that quantum strategies afford in communication-limited games. Inspired by the card game blackjack, we focus on cooperative, two-party sequential games in which a single classical bit of communication is allowed…
Mechanical shufflers used in many casinos employ a card shuffling scheme called \emph{shelf shuffling}. In a single-shelf shuffling, cards arrive sequentially, and each incoming card is independently placed on the top or the bottom of a…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
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…