Rapid mixing of dealer shuffles and clumpy shuffles
Journal article, 2015

A famous result of Bayer and Diaconis [2] is that the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds (GSR) model for the riffle shuffle of n cards mixes in 3/2log(2)n steps and that for 52 cards about 7 shuffles suffices to mix the deck. In this paper, we study variants of the GSR shuffle that have been proposed to model more realistically how people actually shuffle a deck of cards. The clumpy riffle shuffle and dealer riffle shuffle differ from the GSR model in that when a card is dropped from one hand, the conditional probability that the next card is dropped from the same hand is higher/lower than for the GSR model. Until now, no nontrivial rigorous results have been known for the clumpy shuffle or dealer shuffle. In this paper we show that the mixing time is O (log(4)n).

riffle shuffle

collisions

Time-Bounds

entropy technique

Thorp Shuffle

Author

Johan Jonasson

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics

University of Gothenburg

B. Morris

Electronic Communications in Probability

1083589x (eISSN)

Vol. 20 article no. 20 (11 pp.)- 20

Subject Categories

Mathematics

DOI

10.1214/ECP.v20-3682

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 7