I believe Goren recommended 3 shuffles. This will create 8 interleaved streams of cards. After the deal, my hand will have every fourth card. Assuming I know the pre-shuffle order of the deck, I should be able to estimate the details of each shuffle. After the dummy comes down, each player knows the order of his own hand, plus the (unordered) dummy. This might be enough information for a full reconstruction of the shuffles. (The 8 interleaved streams have some additional complicated restrictions, since the are created from only 3 riffle shuffles.) Rich ----------- Quoting Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com>:
The thread on tennis and randomness reminded me of Persi Diaconis's two discoveries about bridge:
1) that the 'standard' method of shuffling wasn't very good and you needed to do additional shuffles to really randomize the deck.
2) bridge masters seemed to occasionally make counter-probabilistic plays [playing finesses and for suit splits, etc], but as a corollary to (1), he discovered that their play was actually correct for the *actual* probabilities [due to the inadequate shuffles].
I found it pretty impressive that the deviation from "true randomness" almost certainly wasn't all that much, but it was enough that the top bridge players could detect the deviation and took advantage of it.
/bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--
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