The Best Card Trick

Posted by Chris Ball Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:21:00 GMT

I gave a talk on The Best Card Trick at the Boston Haskell meetup tonight, and then we implemented the technique together in Haskell as a group. Afterwards, we compared our program with this one that my friend Mark Carroll wrote a long time ago. Here's a summary of the trick from the paper's abstract:

You, my friend, are about to witness the best card trick there is. Here, take this ordinary deck of cards, and draw a hand of five cards from it. Choose them deliberately or randomly, whichever you prefer — but do not show them to me! Show them instead to my lovely assistant, who will now give me four of them, one at a time: the 7♠, then the Q♥, the 8♣, the 3♦. There is one card left in your hand, known only to you and my assistant. And the hidden card, my friend, is the K♠.

In even-more-mind-blowing news, today John McCain gave a talk about OLPC.

Tags , ,  | 3 comments

Comments

  1. Avatar Adam Williamson said about 12 hours later:

    oh wow, thank you for the link =)

    not being a science-y type it took me five minutes to get my head around the concept, but the bonus is not being a science-y type means my friends won't all know about it already. I have to practice now :)

  2. Avatar DarwinSurvivor said 4 months later:

    Any chance you have that pdf on a non-password-protected site?

    I'm kind of a card and math guy, so I'm interrested as to how this works.

  3. Avatar Chris said 4 months later:

    Any chance you have that pdf on a non password-protected site?

    I don't, but Googling ["The Best Card Trick" kleber] will bring up the same password-protected URL with a "Quick View" button that brings up the PDF. (There are some other direct hits to a copy of the PDF farther down the search results, too.)

(leave url/email »)

   Comment Markup Help Preview comment