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.
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 :)
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.
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.)