This looks very familiar. I think I read part of it back in the 80's when I was first learning programming. I think it was in reference to "How to truly 'shuffle' a deck of cards using a computer algorithm. Lots of discussion on techniques to do close to true random shuffling of ordered decks.
It's Bentley's _Programming pearls_ column from the _Communications of the ACM_, which was collected into a series of books, such as _Programming Pearls_ and _More Programming Pearls_, where you probably saw it.