Authors
Persi Diaconis, Ron Graham, Sam Spiro
Publication date
2022/8/9
Journal
The American Mathematical Monthly
Volume
129
Issue
7
Pages
607-622
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Description
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g., correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where suits do not matter), the optimal strategy differs from the “greedy strategy” (of guessing a most likely card each round). Further, both optimal and greedy strategies are far too complicated for real-time use by human players. Our main results show that simple heuristics perform close to optimal.
Total citations
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