I originally posted about this over a year ago on my old blog, but I thought I’d slowly transfer over some of the material as I’m a bit lazy (plus there are some real gems on there). The first up for transfer is a short bit about Persi Diaconis, a very interesting Mathemagician, excuse the ”Good Will Hunting” reference.
Diaconis isn’t your typical Mathematician. At the age of 14 he ran away from home to join travelling magician on his tours and at the age of 17 he was grassing up Carribean casinos for using shaved dice. Today Diaconis is a Professor at Stanford having written about a number of interesting statistical problems involving cards, bias dice and coin flipping.
He showed that a flipped coin always lands on the side that it started on. Having grown up with magic, his thumb was trained so well that he could force a coin to land on heads 10 out of 10 flips. Give the coin to your average Joe and 51% of the time the coin will land on the side it started on.
Also, he showed that if you do 7 riffle-shuffles to an ordinary pack of cards that’s enough to randomise the deck. Doing it 8 times doesn’t really increase the level of randomness in the deck, but 7 is enough for the average person. For a trained casino dealer if they do 8 perfect riffle-shuffles the pack returns to its original state.
For more information on Persi Diaconis head on over to any of the following links:
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