A magician-turned- mathematician

5When a gang of gambling cheaters or, we should say, gambling thinkers smartly hacked a card shuffling machine in a casino and won millions of dollars through their intelligence, it acted as a wake-up call for the card shuffling machine manufacturers. The group of hustlers fitted a camera inside the card shuffling machine and carefully noticed each moment of the card inside the machine. With their rigorous efforts and intelligent techniques, they finally cracked the shuffling machine’s code and won millions of dollars. This incident in Las Vegas created havoc in the Casino industry. The company was apprehensive about its reputation as thousands of its mechanical shufflers were in use in Las Vegas and around the globe, making enormous money through the rental fees. If you want to play on best online casino then visit UFACAM once.

Once the hackers (read hustlers) were caught, the company decided to change its machinery’s functioning and mechanism. The engineers made a new prototype, challenging to hack. They ensured that the device would sufficiently randomise a deck of cards. Now all they needed was an expert’s advice to ensure that the shuffling machine was doing its job correctly. And who is better than Persi Diaconis when you need advice for the world of cards?

Diaconis is a mathematician at Stanford University. But was he always a mathematician? Diaconis was a magician before turning into a mathematician. He has considered the foremost king of the mathematics of card shuffling. His knowledge on this topic is extraordinary and unbeatable. The company contacted Persi to check the new prototype. Diaconues went there with his pal Susan Holmes, a statistician at Stanford University. According to their examination, the pair soon discovered a flaw in the rising or falling sequence. Although the randomness of the card was okay this time, the series of cards was predictable, hence hackable again. 

The company understood the flaw, closed the prototype, and moved to a different machine.  

Diaconis and Holmes solved the issue and saved the company and the Casino from losing millions (again). Diaconis has had love and attraction towards the deck of cards since he was ten. Persi left his home to learn magic and lived on the streets with the famous sleight-of-hand magician; in his ten years on the road, he aced all the styles of shuffling and finding the dealers to crack their techniques. Diaconis has studied the problems that lived on borderlands between order and randomness all his life. He has mastered it all, be it reassembling strands of DNA, optimising web searches, or even decoding scrambled messages. He has a knack for converting problems into questions of card shuffling. 

His interest towards magic began after meeting Alex Elmsley, a Scottish magician who has mastered the ‘perfect shuffle’.  Very few people in the world can do the. ‘perfect shuffle’, and Diaconis is among them. He does ‘perfect shuffling’ in his distinct way by writing ‘RANDOM’ boldly and then shuffling the deck. Diaconis has made his name in the world of cards and mathematics. His research and knowledge have influenced the whole world of mathematics. On his 75th birthday, researchers around the globe showed their gratitude towards Persi with their amazing speeches on maths, stats, randomness, order, magic and cards, of course.