Online card games

DOI10.1214/22-EJP768zbMATH Open1497.60010arXiv2106.11866OpenAlexW4226541544MaRDI QIDQ2136089FDOQ2136089

Authors: Sam Spiro 

Publication date: 10 May 2022

Published in: Electronic Journal of Probability (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded. It was shown by Diaconis, Graham, He, and Spiro that if $m$ is fixed, then the maximum expected number of correct guesses that the player can achieve is asymptotic to $H_{m}logn$, where $H_m$ is the $m$th harmonic number. In this paper we consider an adversarial version of this game where a second player shuffles the deck according to some (possibly non-uniform) distribution. We prove that a certain greedy strategy for the shuffler is the unique optimal strategy in this game, and that the guesser can achieve at most $logn$ expected correct guesses asymptotically for fixed $m$ against this greedy strategy.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11866

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zbMATH Keywords

game theorycard shufflingdiscrete probability

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Combinatorial probability (60C05)

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Cited In (12)

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• What to expect in a game of memory
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• On card guessing game with one time riffle shuffle and complete feedback
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• The card guessing game: a generating function approach
• How to Beat Your Kids at Their Own Game
• Semi-restricted rock, paper, scissors
• Card guessing and the birthday problem for sampling without replacement
• Guessing cards with complete feedback
• How to play Dundee.

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