After World War II
After World War II, engineers tried to generate random sequences using electrical devices. Noise sources (like a hot cathode gas discharge tube or a resistor) would typically be sent through filters and amplifiers to output one or several random streams. Such device is described in a 1940 patent by Newby et al.. Though most patented machines continued to be based on old mechanical designs that did not provide as much randomness as noise sources but were more practical. According to the patents filled during the 1950s and 1960s, designers created simple devices where a basic shuffling operation was repeated several times (by feeding the output deck back into the machine) instead of having one complex pass implying many tricky mechanical operations ending up with a poor shuffling and lower reliability. Some of them tried to reproduce what was manually done during a riffle shuffling with cards interleaving each others. Cards picking using rollers in contact with the top or bottom of the deck were still heavily used at that time.
Read more about this topic: Shuffling Machine
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular.... War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.... War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)