Tagged "probability"

Outguessing a Riffle Shuffle

Jun 24, 2026   |   18 min read   |   technical

The folklore says seven riffle shuffles are enough to randomize a deck of cards. I trained a small transformer to guess the next card after k shuffles, gave it the deck's starting order, and let it watch every card as it was dealt. One shuffle is wildly predictable; the edge shrinks fast, but a faint, statistically real signal survives all the way out to eleven shuffles.