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Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

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Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#51

Post by bombcar »

RNanoware wrote: post #11

Anecdotally, I find that certain card games are more enjoyable with the imperfections of human shuffling: when clumps naturally arise after playing, packing, and unpacking the game several times. An element of organic personality arises when you see a sequence of cards from a previous game. That human element is lost when a computer perfectly shuffles a deck into a never-before-seen orientation.

There's even a form of bridge related to this IIRC, if a hand is passed out (nobody has opening to start the bidding), you stack the hands on top of each other and don't shuffle - because players organize their cards by suits, it always results in fun.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#52

Post by PaulHoule »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #48
PaulHoule wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in a tarot group where we have a lot of decks that people share. Many tarot users believe that a deck develops a personality specific to the user and because of that I got my own deck which I take to the group. There's the general belief that all magical tools develop significance for the user over time, something that my wife who is a "secular green witch" who doesn't believe in psi at all would tell you all ab…

One of the things is, I do magic, and used to do tarot. I found the tarot readings were infinitely better to the person getting the reading when I just forced the results. So I did. I still did all the things you're indicating about talking about specific personality, etc, as the patter to the concept.

Yeah, I see a lot of people doing tarot readings for money but I don't see myself doing that.

I got into the tarot group because it's not so easy to find a therianthrope's guild!

From a scientific perspective there is a lot to say for randomness. Like the theory that the I Ching was a version of game theory from bronze age China. I recently created A System of Blessings with 13 selected characters from the I Ching because I wanted to give people something nice but didn't want to give everybody the same thing.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#53

Post by WorldMaker »

empath75 wrote: post #44
WorldMaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marked decks are an ancient tradition for both cheaters and magicians. There are also ways to mark a deck that aren't obvious to most people with a casual inspection and that don't need an app to read from the edge.

Yeah, but there aren't ones that will give you the _entire stack_ in less than a second from a glance at the side of the deck.

You might be surprised at how close they sometimes get, at a glance. For close up magic it has to be readable at a quick glance (without an app). For some of the cheating it has to "not even be a glance" because you can't get caught looking at the side of a deck.

To be fair, sure most of those marking strategies are approximations designed for a specific trick or a specific gambling game and so don't always need to be 100% of the state information (suit and rank of every individual card). But there are certainly close up magic reasons to have a deck you can find exact cards by marks. Though also to be fair, many (but not all) of those do move the marks to the back of the card with the assumption that you can at least spread the backs of the cards.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#54

Post by cadamsdotcom »

possiblywrong wrote: post #37

The article deserves several clarifications: > The deck has to be cut more or less in half before shuffling. "More or less" is doing some heavy lifting here. The original GSR shuffling model cuts the deck at a point that is binomially distributed , so that for example about one-fifth of the time the cut may be at least as asymmetric as a 21-31 card split, which I think most would agree is nowhere near "the precision…

Why does it matter that only the cut is imperfect? Isn’t an imperfect interleaving also expressible as a modification to the unevenness of that left/right pile split? It seems the “0110” system doesn’t track relative order of cards but only the landing of each card, which allows each left/right landing to be treated as an independent event. If there’s no dependency on card order, modifying the cut split is a simple way to express both an uneven cut and imperfect interleaving with one variable.

But that assumes the model is only tracking cards’ arrivals in the left and right piles, not their ordering relative to one another. I only got that from the article.

Am I missing something? Is it that the left/right split is actually only informative about the amount of mixing that has occurred under the assumption that the interleaving was perfect, and therefore if imperfect interleaving is possible then one must weaken that guarantee - which then requires a more complex tracking system?

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#55

Post by AndyNemmity »

PaulHoule wrote: post #52
AndyNemmity wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things is, I do magic, and used to do tarot. I found the tarot readings were infinitely better to the person getting the reading when I just forced the results. So I did. I still did all the things you're indicating about talking about specific personality, etc, as the patter to the concept.

Yeah, I see a lot of people doing tarot readings for money but I don't see myself doing that. I got into the tarot group because it's not so easy to find a therianthrope's guild! From a scientific perspective there is a lot to say for randomness. Like the theory that the I Ching was a version of game theory from bronze age China. I recently created A System of Blessings with 13 selected characters from the I Ching be…

I never did it for money. I did it for free. My joy was in their joy.

My job was to heighten their experience, and to essentially act as a mini therapist enabling them to feel confident in their own decisions.

But I feel you. I did things entirely differently to everyone else. Which is why I thought it was an interesting story.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#56

Post by PaulHoule »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #55
PaulHoule wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I see a lot of people doing tarot readings for money but I don't see myself doing that. I got into the tarot group because it's not so easy to find a therianthrope's guild! From a scientific perspective there is a lot to say for randomness. Like the theory that the I Ching was a version of game theory from bronze age China. I recently created A System of Blessings with 13 selected characters from the I Ching be…

I never did it for money. I did it for free. My joy was in their joy. My job was to heighten their experience, and to essentially act as a mini therapist enabling them to feel confident in their own decisions. But I feel you. I did things entirely differently to everyone else. Which is why I thought it was an interesting story.

Myself I charm people with fox magic to melt them into puddles before I photograph them

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116731777979379420

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#57

Post by mrandish »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #47
empath75 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a "perfect" shuffle is known as a faro shuffle and it's the basis of a lot of magic tricks, but it's a weird looking shuffle and it sort of ruins the tricks once you can recognize it.

not a lot of magic tricks. quite few actually. and it's interesting that it ruins the trick for you, because it's still a quite hard maneuver. as a magician, I'm always still impressed when I see perfect faros.

Yeah, I worked on getting a Faro for a while when I was a teenager but gave up on it after a few months. I even got some coaching and tips from the Professor and Earl Nelson, so the issue was definitely not a lack of knowing the best ways it's ever been done :-). I just couldn't get it quite reliable enough to 100% trust in performance. Plus most of the Faro effects that were hot at the time were poker stacks and I was never really into those plots.

Now, all these decades later, I don't regret giving up on the Faro and a burnable 2nd. I got along just fine without either one as there's so many ways to reach the same destinations. It's weird how some moves just 'speak to you' right away and others never seem to sit right. Best advice I ever got was to not force it. If progress stalls out, just move on.

You going to Magic Live this year?

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#58

Post by retrac »

PaulHoule wrote: post #36
brookst wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games that sort the cards are the worst / most interesting for this. Gin rummy, etc, where the end result of a game is sorted groups of same-numbers and runs. You can really tell when then shuffling has just transposed a few cards.

I am in a tarot group where we have a lot of decks that people share. Many tarot users believe that a deck develops a personality specific to the user and because of that I got my own deck which I take to the group. There's the general belief that all magical tools develop significance for the user over time, something that my wife who is a "secular green witch" who doesn't believe in psi at all would tell you all ab…

I find significance in the shuffling and enjoy it. Always overhand. And very thorough; I have a perhaps overmechanistic view but I suspect effective divination requires true randomness in the information theory sense.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#59

Post by pmyteh »

bombcar wrote: post #51
RNanoware wrote: post #11

Anecdotally, I find that certain card games are more enjoyable with the imperfections of human shuffling: when clumps naturally arise after playing, packing, and unpacking the game several times. An element of organic personality arises when you see a sequence of cards from a previous game. That human element is lost when a computer perfectly shuffles a deck into a never-before-seen orientation.

There's even a form of bridge related to this IIRC, if a hand is passed out (nobody has opening to start the bidding), you stack the hands on top of each other and don't shuffle - because players organize their cards by suits, it always results in fun.

Yes - it's called goulashing. The cards are stacked and dealt out in groups of three and four to produce wild distributions.

The most interesting feature of it for me is that the carefully-developed bridge bidding systems don't work properly as they're implicitly based on a normal random distribution of cards. With a goulash it's likely that both sides have hands with 7+ cards in one suit, and the game is to pre-emptively bid high in "your" suit before they can do so in theirs. So you would ideally like different signaling arrangements that indicate suit length rather than quality.

Re: Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?

#60

Post by cindyllm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #56
AndyNemmity wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never did it for money. I did it for free. My joy was in their joy. My job was to heighten their experience, and to essentially act as a mini therapist enabling them to feel confident in their own decisions. But I feel you. I did things entirely differently to everyone else. Which is why I thought it was an interesting story.

Myself I charm people with fox magic to melt them into puddles before I photograph them https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116731777979379420

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