Shuffling shenanigans
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Question Sheet: Shuffling shenanigans

Question Sheet: Shuffling Shenanigans

SCIENCE

Before reading:

1. How do you shuffle cards, and what is your particular precise (or imprecise) procedure?
2. How many times do you think you need to shuffle a deck of cards before they’re totally mixed up?
3. Why does it matter?

During reading:

1. What made Persi Diaconis become a mathematician?
2. What does “probability” mean when playing card games?
3. What does it mean for cards to be perfectly random?
4. What is the likelihood that you can pick a desired card, without seeing its face value, from a randomly shuffled deck of regular playing cards (or example: one in X number of tries)?
5. How many times did the Diaconis and Bayer computer program indicate that cards must be shuffled to be completely (or almost completely) random?
6. When you don’t worry about shuffling four suits but only the equivalent of two suits (as in Old Maid), how many shuffles are necessary to get a fairly random ordering of the cards?

After Reading

1. What did Diaconis’ experiments in shuffling have to do with magic? In other words, how does insufficient shuffling aid magicians?
2. What difference does it make whether people know how to shuffle cards into random order? (Hint: What’s at “stake”?)

SOCIAL STUDIES

1. People collectively spend many millions of dollars each year to play games of chance, from cards to roulette. From what you learned in this story, do you think people understand the risks and stakes of their games? And in many instances, games of chance are used to raise money for public goods — such as state education budgets. Explain why you think that is — or is not — a fair use of taxpayer money.
2. What insights did this story give you into the world of magic? Think about the issue of illusion. What was an illusion in the card shuffling and how might it affect an individual’s willingness to spend money on a game of “chance?”

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