Related papers: Matching adjacent cards
We define a \textit{cap} in the affine geometry $AG(n,2)$ to be a subset in which any collection of 4 points is in general position. In this paper we classify, up to affine equivalence, all caps in $AG(n,2)$ of size $k \leq 9$. As a result,…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where…
Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…
We determine upper and lower bounds for the number of maximum matchings (i.e., matchings of maximum cardinality) $m(T)$ of a tree $T$ of given order. While the trees that attain the lower bound are easily characterised, the trees with…
We revisit the classic 'guess my number' game and extend it from its familiar binary form to representations in any integer base. For each base we derive formulas for the number of cards needed to identify a given integer and, conversely,…
Between the poker hands of straight, flush, and full house, which hand is more common? In standard 5-card poker, the order from most common to least common is straight, flush, full house. The same order is true for 7-card poker such as…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
This paper examines the classical matching distribution arising in the "problem of coincidences". We generalise the classical matching distribution with a preliminary round of allocation where items are correctly matched with some fixed…
In a generalized tournament, players may have an arbitrary number of matches against each other and the outcome of the games is measured on a cardinal scale with a lower and upper bound. An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
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 $…
We investigate the rank of the average mixing matrix of trees, with all eigenvalues distinct. The rank of the average mixing matrix of a tree on $n$ vertices with $n$ distinct eigenvalues is upper-bounded by $\frac{n}{2}$. Computations on…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
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…
We study the maximal rank in affine subspaces of symmetric or alternating matrices, in terms of the matching numbers of certain associated graphs. Applications include simple proofs of upper bounds on the dimension of such subspaces in…
We define a natural equivalence relation on collections of cards from the card game SET, and enumerate some of the equivalence classes, vastly generalizing the standard game. On this basis, we describe several alternative games for the SET…