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The math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire

(www.scientificamerican.com)
97 points indigodaddy | 4 comments | 05 Sep 25 22:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.651s | source
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sneak ◴[07 Sep 25 02:05 UTC] No.45154725[source]▶
> Card dealers create a unique deck with each shuffle, something computers cannot replicate

This is entirely, unequivocally false.

Shuffling as an algorithm to implement is easy to fuck up, but if you use a good one and a true RNG source, computers can shuffle better than humans - just as randomly, and many orders of magnitude faster.

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1. indigodaddy ◴[07 Sep 25 02:14 UTC] No.45154777[source]▶
Maybe they mean that computers can't replicate the imperfections/shortcomings that might define human/hand shuffling? That's kind of how I took it.
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2. evrydayhustling ◴[07 Sep 25 02:35 UTC] No.45154877[source]▶
Those human imperfections likely decrease randomness - for example leaving cards that started adjacent more likely to remain adjacent han by strict chance.
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3. harrall ◴[07 Sep 25 02:41 UTC] No.45154926[source]▶
They most definitely decrease randomness.

But I guess the article’s point is that human imperfections offset that with lower correlated failure modes.

4. dwattttt ◴[07 Sep 25 02:53 UTC] No.45154986[source]▶
Given

> an algorithm would randomly select an arrangement from the 52! possible decks. But no computer has enough memory to evaluate all of these possibilities

It sounds more like they don't understand how a computer can shuffle something.