Shuffling in the Age of Computers :: Technology Electronics Essays

Shuffling in the Age of ComputersWhether learnt from a Hollywood cinema or some crude rendition of Dogs Playing Poker everyone has some mental picture of the American card-playing experience the hazy cloud of cigar reek hovering just above the table the half(a)-empty bottle of whiskey lying conspicuously closest to the smallest stack of money the grizzled middle-aged man struggling to mingle a deck of cards. And yet despite this universal imagery, nothing could be further from the truth. I recently spent a weekend at Canterbury approximate range in Minnesota, a card-club just south of the Twin Cities. Having arrived there at around three in the morning, I became aware that smoking was not allowed at the tables, that drinks were no longer being served, and that even the once immutable middle-aged man had been replaced by an electronic shuffling machine. Of course I realize the hazards of second-hand pinhead I can even find compromise with temperance however, to replace the t ittup, the games manifestation of trust and mistrust, was to me unacceptable. Realizing immediately that poker was forever ruined, I returned to Iowa distraught and inconsolable. why would a card-room want to use a machine to sort cards in a deck? Could the benefits of such a machine really be worth the costs? Is it possible to find happiness in the sullen world of mechanized random? Presently there are three overabundant technologies for card-shuffling the cutting-edge computerized shufflers used in casinos, the battery-operated home game models, and the archaic, yet ever popular, human hand.Shuffling, of course, is the process of randomizing a deck of cards so that order is unknown. This sounds beauteous straight-forward, but considering there are over 8.06x1067 permutations of a 52-card deck the task of finding a good method becomes slightly more daunting. For example, in hand shuffling, mathematicians question the reliability of common methods to produce all of these know n combinations. Two of the most common hand shuffling techniques are the riffle shuffle (mixing two halves of a deck the standard bridge shuffle) and Monges shuffle (moving cards from one half alternatively to the top and bottom of the other half see picture above). Although superficially a deck may appear to be rearranged using these shuffles, close examination of the deck tends to show high sequential correlationsimply a large probability that patterns exist and can be detected.