Re: Card dealing and random repetition

pete wrote:
Gerry Quinn wrote:

In article <%0AVf.32718$nz4.4826@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
simaldeff@xxxxxxxxx says...
I though about something while reading your post.
Have you ever seen someone shuffle a deck? ...

I think this method looks funnier. Could it have any utility? It's a
direct emulation of the real-world card shuffling.

But mainly it emulates the defects of real-world card shuffling. A
perfect shuffle has no structure of the kind you describe.

"A perfect shuffle" sounds like
it would be a bad thing in a card game.

Unless you are concerned about players exploiting its
defects/structure/non-randomness. See Knuth's TAOCP Vol. 2 anecdotes
about the "Super-random" number generator and card shuffling: "A
moment's reflection is enough to convince oneself that the approaches
people traditionally use to shuffle cards are miserably inadequate;
there is no hope of obtaining each of the t! permutations with anywhere
near equal probability by such methods. It has been said that expert
bridge players make use of this fact when deciding whether or not to
'finesse.'" He then introduces the (well known) shuffle attributed to
Moses and Oakford (1963).


--
pete

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