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vessenestoday at 3:33 PM1 replyview on HN

Ironically seven perfectly interleaved riffle shuffles will return a deck to its original order, so the title is spectacularly wrong for one famous result.

Also the new result is cool! (14 semi bad riffle shuffles are sufficient to mix)


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zahlmantoday at 4:07 PM

It requires eight perfect riffle shuffles, not seven. (I just checked at the Python REPL.) And actually it depends on whether the riffles are done "in" or "out" (i.e. which half of the deck the new top card comes from).

I had understood that seven "typical" riffle shuffles produce good randomness.

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