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:
“Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)