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"Coming Up Trumps," by Erica Klarreich. New Scientist, 20 July 2002, pages 42-44.
How well does the card-shuffling machine shuffle cards? When a Las Vegas casino company wanted to find out, it asked mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis of Stanford University. Diaconis and Susan Holmes, a Stanford statistician, analyzed the machine and found that the machine did not mix the cards well enough. Their strategy for guessing the order of some of the cards in a machine-shuffled deck "was enough to unsettle the company engineers," Klarreich writes. The engineers are now trying to figure out how to correct this problem. Surprisingly, the method the machines use, called "shelf shuffling," has a link to noncommutative geometry, which arises in quantum mechanics.
--- Allyn Jackson
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