Shuffling in the Age of Computers :: Technology Electronics Essays

Shuffling in the Age of Computers Whether learnt from a Hollywood movie or some crude rendition of â€Å"Dogs Playing Poker" everyone has some mental picture of the American card-playing experience: the hazy cloud of cigar smoke hovering just above the table; the half-empty bottle of whiskey lying conspicuously closest to the smallest stack of money; the grizzled middle-aged man struggling to intermix a deck of cards. And yet despite this universal imagery, nothing could be further from the truth. I recently spent a weekend at Canterbury Park 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allowed at the tables, that drinks were no longer being served, and that even the once immutable middle-aged man had been replaced by an electronic shuffling machine.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 smoke; I can even find compromise with temperance; however, to replace the shuffle, the game's 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 prevailing 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 pretty straight-forward, but considering there are over 8.06x10^67 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 known combinations. Two of the most common hand shuffling techniques are the riffle shuffle (mixing two halves of a deck; the standard bridge shuffle) and Monge’s 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 serial correlation—simply a large probability that patterns exist and can be detected.