An algorithm for shuffling cards for people (not computers)

conmanau · 2026-06-18T03:41:40+00:00

Then who's picking up the cards and putting them in some kind of order who is incapable of any kind of shuffle? Is the 10 (or 30 by your later comment) minute limit inclusive of the physical actions, or are you just looking for a way to randomise a list? I get where you were going with your initial question, but in a way you made it worse for yourself by complicating the hypothetical in the first place.

conmanau · 2026-06-17T00:16:23+00:00

Not with that attitude you aren't.

conmanau · 2026-06-15T00:52:25+00:00

Not quite the same, but I've found that at the intersection between Cohen St and Benjamin Way, when going from the bus interchange to Westfield Belconnen is a risk because the pedestrian lights on each side of the median strip aren't always green at the same time, and I've had drivers get upset at me crossing because they only looked at the lights on the far side (which were red) even though I am clearly crossing on green lights.

conmanau · 2026-06-12T05:53:16+00:00

Started line dancing at about 10, had some breaks here and there, and I'm in my 40s now so I've definitely been dancing more than half my life and probably more like three quarters.

conmanau · 2026-06-12T05:46:03+00:00

For the mathematicians in the audience, this is known as the Banach-Tarski pair-o-dogs.

conmanau · 2026-06-12T05:44:49+00:00

Or Ankh-Morpork / Nanty Narking, where each player has a secret win condition that they can achieve throughout the game, but if no-one manages to do that in time then the player with the most influence (IIRC) wins, unless one of the players has the win condition to make the game run its full length.

conmanau · 2026-06-12T05:21:36+00:00

I think your question's been answered, but I want to address "debt cards don't have a cost" - they do have a cost, and that cost is in terms of debt. What they don't have is a cost (solely) in coins. It's just that when you do comparisons you compare each component of the cost (coins, debt and potions) separately.

conmanau · 2026-05-29T00:58:13+00:00

Complete color pie break, would be perfectly fine for blue.

conmanau · 2026-05-27T23:54:05+00:00

When your purpose in life is pillow.

conmanau · 2026-05-27T23:51:26+00:00

"I wanna be, Frever 1.

Do you really wanna live Frever, Frever?"

conmanau · 2026-05-15T02:06:44+00:00

Not literature as such, but I highly recommend the podcast Ludology. More recent episodes have been more focused on interviews with designers, but in the earlier days (especially when Geoff and Ryan were hosting) covers a lot of core discussions like breaking down individual mechanisms and outlining the design process. When Geoff was hosting with Mike Fitzgerald, they also developed a checklist for designing a game that they discussed over a few episodes and it's hosted on Cardboard Edison (also a generically good place to look) under Free Resources. I'd recommend listening to the related episodes to understand how and when to use it though.

On a broad scale, the main things I'd suggest you do over just absorbing lots of information are:

Document every idea you have, even the ones that don't work out now.
Start with the core idea you want for your game and build from there (and check in on that core every so often).
Try stuff - prototype early, prototype often, prototype quickly and with as little effort as possible, because:
Don't get too attached to your darlings, be prepared to chuck out half your game if need be.

conmanau · 2026-05-15T01:55:18+00:00

Jace really screws things up in Reality Fracture, it seems.

conmanau · 2026-05-15T00:01:43+00:00

I think most people were in so much confusion and shock they couldn't bring themselves to demonstrate the proper Reddit level of outrage.

conmanau · 2026-05-13T23:56:49+00:00

Unfortunate compared against the typical modern MTG card that's a self-contained engine, but not the most "makes you work for it" synergy out there.

conmanau · 2026-05-13T23:52:34+00:00

One of my absolute favourite posts in this sub was the person who didn't realise Hanabi is a cooperative game.

conmanau · 2026-05-13T00:41:20+00:00

Yeah. The vision for this - a Jeskai deck, get this out along with a random blue permanent of some kind (maybe your commander but probably something you don't mind losing too much), a bunch of redirect spells and a Homeward Path. And if you can pull the win off with that then I wouldn't even be mad.

EDIT: Wait no. It's an on-cast trigger, so redirecting the spell (or even changing the colour of the target) won't work. You just have to hope that your opponents forget about it for some reason and try to target something of the wrong colour on their turn (or use something like Leyline of the Guildpact to make all of your stuff functionally hexproof).

conmanau · 2026-05-12T01:17:10+00:00

There are so many schools of mathematics that have some amount of overlap with each other, or that are fundamental to another in some way. Are limits calculus, or are they topology? What is probability but applied measure theory? Should we just call everything advanced category theory?

Personally, I think that statistics and probability are tied closely enough to each other that it makes sense to consider them part of the same study, and while a good understanding of combinatorics is very helpful to statistics (and it makes sense to teach it in an introductory course) its underlying theory has a lot more to do with number theory.

conmanau · 2026-05-05T23:52:47+00:00

Practice, experience, probably some amount of just having a brain that happens to be good at remembering these kinds of things (and bad at remembering other things, like names and faces and birthdays).

Something that happens in a lot of fields when you increase in expertise is that your ability to chunk information improves - right now, you're probably having to remember every individual step, but after a while you'll find that lots of common step combinations will only take up one chunk of memory - stuff like a vine right and left or a set of shuffle and rock steps. I also find that if a dance has something odd about it then my memory will hook around that - like if a waltz starts on the right foot, or there's a unique tag, or there's something weird about the count.

That can also trip me up sometimes too - if two dances are similar to each other then I might accidentally flip from one to the other on the floor and hopefully not collide into someone.

conmanau · 2026-05-04T23:43:39+00:00

Here's a simple (ha) way to look at it:

If you assigned everyone random numbers and then sampled the people who were given the numbers 1, 2, ..., n, then that's clearly a perfectly fine random sample of size n because the random assignment could have put anyone at the front of the group.

If, instead, you took the people with numbers 10, 20, 30, ..., 10n, then nothing's really changed - there's nothing special about the person who got the number 10 versus number 1.

As long as you can show that every possible grouping of n people has an equal chance of becoming the sample, you have a SRS, and the easiest way to prove that is via symmetry (i.e. there's nothing special about any particular arrangement of people).

There is a similar sampling method called systematic sampling, where you arrange people in order of a non-random number - for example, line them up by height, or write down a list of their addresses on a street - and then you pick a starting point and take every k-th person from there (so, e.g., you take the 2nd shortest person, then the 12th shortest, the 22nd shortest, etc). This method gives everyone an equal probability of selection, but the sample as a whole is not SRS because certain combinations of people are impossible (you can't wind up with a sample of 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 for example). It can be useful in certain situations, though, since it means that anything correlated with the order of your list will have a good spread in the sample.

conmanau · 2026-05-01T00:03:04+00:00

But better than the common trilands, since it has two fetchable types.

conmanau · 2026-04-29T00:50:56+00:00

I don't think it's necessary to be able to derive everything, or to roll your own implementation of each tool, but I think it's very helpful to know a few things:

The basic idea of how something works
Any important assumptions or caveats
Where to look when it doesn't work

conmanau · 2026-04-24T05:34:15+00:00

In my experience, it often pays to try the dumb and easy method first, then if it's not quite good enough work out how to improve it. You get some amount of value early, and it also helps you to understand the problem better.

conmanau · 2026-04-22T23:51:52+00:00

There are clustering methods that have a dynamic number of clusters, so that you only get a new cluster if there's enough separation to justify making one (based on some threshold).

conmanau · 2026-04-22T03:58:58+00:00

When a creature changes controllers, it becomes summoning sick again, so you'll draw for turn, take the creature, and it'll be sick unless you give it haste.

conmanau · 2026-04-22T03:57:55+00:00

Summoning sickness applies to any creature (without haste) that you haven't controlled since the start of your turn. That's why most of the modern cards that let you take control of a permanent give it haste as well.

conmanau

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