A rule of thumb for riffle shuffling (Q549858)

The paper is concerned with the mixing properties of the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffling of \(n\) cards. The authors study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix \(n\) cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, for example, suits can be disregarded or only the colors are of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from \(\frac23\log_2n\) to \(\log_2n\). A main result is a unified ``rule of thumb'' formula.