How do playing cards work? No one knows
8 comments
·January 17, 2025LordDragonfang
zvr
> [1] There are fully-functional solitaire solvers, though, and have been for literal decades.
According to Persi Diaconis' 2024 presentation (linked in the original article), the best computer solver can only win 34.2% of games, taking 2080 seconds per game -- a far cry from the complete 82% solution of winnable games.
add-sub-mul-div
These comments are so much more annoying than titles ever are.
jamiek88
Yes the culture here of describing any kind of interesting title as ‘click bait’ is very irritating.
LordDragonfang
It's not that the title is interesting, it's that it's objectively incorrect. People know how cards work. The article does not put forth any unsolved properties of cards. It's bad on purpose to make you click.
zvr
People interested in cards might be interested to visit Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer, a museum of playing cards in the outskirts of Paris. https://www.museecarteajouer.com/ I was thoroughly impressed by it.
mystified5016
This is an article about how 52 factorial is a very, very large number.
That's pretty much it.
delecti
It's really not. It talks about that at the beginning, but also goes into the appeal and design of card and puzzle games, a few specific card-focused video games, and then a significant segment on the history of playing cards themselves. The bit about 52! is less than a quarter of the whole.
Clickbait title. It's half a protracted discussion about how solitaire isn't fully computable on current hardware[1], and half a history of playing cards (as referenced in the url). Perhaps "Probability and history of playing cards", or just take "A Playing Card History" from the URL.
[1] There are fully-functional solitaire solvers, though, and have been for literal decades.