English

Card-cyclic-to-random shuffling with relabeling

Probability 2015-09-29 v3

Abstract

The card-cyclic-to-random shuffle is the card shuffle where the nn cards are labeled 1,,n1,\ldots,n according to their starting positions. Then the cards are mixed by first picking card 11 from the deck and reinserting it at a uniformly random position, then repeating for card 22, then for card 33 and so on until all cards have been reinserted in this way. Then the procedure starts over again, by first picking the card with label 11 and reinserting, and so on. Morris, Ning and Peres \cite{MNP} recently showed that the order of the number of shuffles needed to mix the deck in this way is nlognn\log n. In the present paper, we consider a variant of this shuffle with relabeling, i.e.\ a shuffle that differs from the above in that after one round, i.e.\ after all cards have been reinserted once, we relabel the cards according to the positions in the deck that they now have. The relabeling is then repeated after each round of shuffling. It is shown that even in this case, the correct order of mixing is nlognn\log n.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.05485,
  title  = {Card-cyclic-to-random shuffling with relabeling},
  author = {Johan Jonasson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.05485},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

25 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:09:43.303Z