Related papers: Matching adjacent cards
The card-cyclic-to-random shuffle is the card shuffle where the $n$ cards are labeled $1,\ldots,n$ according to their starting positions. Then the cards are mixed by first picking card $1$ from the deck and reinserting it at a uniformly…
A matching in a graph is uniquely restricted if no other matching covers exactly the same set of vertices. We establish tight lower bounds on the maximum size of a uniquely restricted matching in terms of order, size, and maximum degree.
Various card tricks involve under-down dealing, where alternatively one card is placed under the deck and the next card is dealt. We study how the cards need to be prepared in the deck to be dealt in order. The order in which the $N$ cards…
Drafting, i.e., the selection of a subset of items from a larger candidate set, is a key element of many games and related problems. It encompasses team formation in sports or e-sports, as well as deck selection in many modern card games.…
We consider the following game that has been used as a way of testing claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). One is given a deck of $mn$ cards comprised of $n$ distinct types each of which appears exactly $m$ times: this deck is shuffled…
Consider n cards that are labeled 1 through n with n an even integer. The cards are put face down and their ordering starts with card labeled 1 on top through card labeled n at the bottom. The cards are top to random shuffled m times and…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
The Tsetlin library is a well-studied Markov chain on the symmetric group $S_n$. It has stationary distribution $\pi(\sigma)$ the Luce model, a nonuniform distribution on $S_n$, which appears in psychology, horse race betting, and…
Consider the following method of card shuffling. Start with a deck of $N$ cards numbered 1 through N. Fix a parameter $p$ between 0 and 1. In this model a ``shuffle'' consists of uniformly selecting a pair of adjacent cards and then…
In this expository article, we highlight the direct connection between card shuffling and the functions known as $P$-partitions that come from algebraic combinatorics. While many (but not all) of the results we discuss are known, we give a…
The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…
Suppose one desires to randomly sample a pair of objects such as socks, hoping to get a matching pair. Even in the simplest situation for sampling, which is sampling with replacement, the innocent phrase "the distribution of the color of a…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…
We consider a matching problem in a bipartite graph $G$ where every vertex has a capacity and a strict preference order on its neighbors. Furthermore, there is a cost function on the edge set. We assume $G$ admits a perfect matching, i.e.,…
A deck of $n$ cards are shuffled by repeatedly taking off the top card, flipping it with probability $1/2$, and inserting it back into the deck at a random position. This process can be considered as a Markov chain on the group $B_n$ of…
In this paper, we study two problems related to planar matchings in random bipartite graphs. First, we colour each edge of the complete bipartite graph $K_{n,n}$ uniformly randomly from amongst ${r}$ colours and show that if ${r}$ grows…
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 study the number of linear extensions of a partial order with a given proportion of comparable pairs of elements, and estimate the maximum and minimum possible numbers. We also consider a random interval partial order on $n$ elements,…
How many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards? This question may be answered in the language of a random walk on the symmetric group, $S_{52}$. This generalises neatly to the study of random walks on finite groups, themselves a…
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…