How Many Times Do I have to Shuffle a Deck of Cards?
Only seven times my friends - only seven times. See below - but given the math - that's how many times more or less. :-)
Here’s the rule: To assure cards get sufficiently mixed up, shuffle a deck about seven times. Mathematician, magician and card shark Persi Diaconis of Stanford University, along with David Bayer of Columbia University, created shock waves in Las Vegas when he figured that out back in 1992. Most dealers had been shuffling much less.
But now Diaconis and his colleagues are issuing an update. When dealing many gambling games, like blackjack, about four shuffles are enough. The reason for the lower number is that many games require randomness for only a few specific aspects of the cards, not all. In blackjack, for example, suits don’t matter. Diaconis and his collaborators extended the earlier analysis to account for these variations.
Gamblers and casinos aren’t the only ones who will benefit. One the most useful tools for applied mathematicians — the Monte Carlo simulation — was inspired by the games of chance that are main attractions in Monte Carlo, Monaco. The new card-shuffling results apply directly to this method, promising to save mathematicians computer time.
Read at Science News / Shuffling The Cards: Math Does The Trick
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Posted by Jay Brewer at November 25, 2008 9:38 AM
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