Sami Assaf ; Persi Diaconis ; K. Soundararajan - Riffle shuffles of a deck with repeated cards

dmtcs:2733 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, January 1, 2009, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AK, 21st International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2009) - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.2733
Riffle shuffles of a deck with repeated cardsArticle

Authors: Sami Assaf 1; Persi Diaconis 2; K. Soundararajan 3

  • 1 Department of Mathematics [MIT]
  • 2 Department of Statistics [Stanford]
  • 3 Department of Mathematics [Stanford]

We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and asymptotic results for all decks of practical interest, e.g. a deck of 52 cards. But what if one only cares about the colors of the cards or disregards the suits focusing solely on the ranks? More generally, how does the rate of convergence of a Markov chain change if we are interested in only certain features? Our exploration of this problem takes us through random walks on groups and their cosets, discovering along the way exact formulas leading to interesting combinatorics, an 'amazing matrix', and new analytic methods which produce a completely general asymptotic solution that is remarkable accurate.


Volume: DMTCS Proceedings vol. AK, 21st International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2009)
Section: Proceedings
Published on: January 1, 2009
Imported on: January 31, 2017
Keywords: card shuffling,lumping of Markov chains,Poisson summation,[MATH.MATH-CO] Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO],[INFO.INFO-DM] Computer Science [cs]/Discrete Mathematics [cs.DM]
Funding:
    Source : OpenAIRE Graph
  • Topics in the Analytic Theory of $L$-functions; Funder: National Science Foundation; Code: 0500711

Consultation statistics

This page has been seen 235 times.
This article's PDF has been downloaded 342 times.