Period of the over-under shuffle on 14 cards
Question
A deck is held face down and dealt one card at a time into the other hand: the second card goes on top of the first, the third goes underneath, the fourth on top, and so on alternately until all are moved. Repeating this shuffle eventually restores the original order; for cards it takes shuffles, and for cards it takes shuffles. How many shuffles restore a -card deck?
Short answer
. Writing one shuffle as a permutation of the positions and following where card goes, the permutation turns out to be a single -cycle. The order of a permutation is the lcm of its cycle lengths, so exactly shuffles are needed (a direct simulation agrees).
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
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