Poker Chip Riffling - Update #1
Quick update. My poker chip riffling is improving fairly dramatically. I can riffle two stacks of four and five chips successfully well over 80% of the time. I can riffle two stacks of six chips successfully at least 50% of the time.
And - Cheese, this part is for you - I managed to riffle two stacks of seven chips successfully enough times in a row to scramble them and then un-scramble them. That sounds like a significantly greater achievement than it actually was. It only took 4 consecutive successful riffles to get them to unscramble. Which struck me as a very peculiar result. So I did it a few more times and them is the facts. It takes 4 successful riffles to scramble and unscramble two stacks of seven poker chips.
You heard it here. Not first, I'm sure. But anyway ...
posted by garrett @ 9:17 PM
3 Comments:
That seems odd that the chips would unscramble after 4 riffles. I'm sure there's some math that would bear that out, but I'm not your man.
I had the same thought. But after learning what I'm about to share, I'm not convinced there is any one formula you can apply to predict the number of riffles that will be required for a particular number of poker chips. The only thing I think I can say about it for sure is that two equal stacks of any number of poker chips will, if correctly riffled enough times, unscramble.
Here's the number of times it takes to scramble and unscramble two stacks of the following chip stack sizes (starting with the two stacks unscrambled):
3 chips - 3 riffles
4 chips - 3 riffles
5 chips - 5 riffles
6 chips - 6 riffles
7 chips - 4 riffles
8 chips - 4 riffles
We did 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 manually (i.e., without riffling) just to see if we could predict the number of riffles it would take, but I am going to maintain some semblance of suspense here and not share the outcomes of those experiments until I can riffle those amounts of chips enough times to scramble and unscramble them myself.
Ruffles have ridges
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