Patience Sorting - The Card Game

The Card Game

The game begins with a shuffled deck of cards, labeled .

The cards are dealt one by one into a sequence of piles on the table, according to the following rules.

  1. Initially, there are no piles. The first card dealt forms a new pile consisting of the single card.
  2. Each new card may be placed either on an existing pile whose top card has a value higher than the new card's value, thus increasing the number of cards in that pile, or to the right of all of the existing piles, thus forming a new pile.
  3. When there are no more cards remaining to deal, the game ends.

The object of the game is to finish with as few piles as possible. D. Aldous and P. Diaconis suggest defining 9 or fewer piles as a winning outcome for, which has approximately 5% chance to happen.

Read more about this topic:  Patience Sorting

Famous quotes containing the words card and/or game:

    What is the disease which manifests itself in an inability to leave a party—any party at all—until it is all over and the lights are being put out?... I suppose that part of this mania for staying is due to a fear that, if I go, something good will happen and I’ll miss it. Somebody might do card tricks, or shoot somebody else.
    Robert Benchley (1889–1945)

    The indispensable ingredient of any game worth its salt is that the children themselves play it and, if not its sole authors, share in its creation. Watching TV’s ersatz battles is not the same thing at all. Children act out their emotions, they don’t talk them out and they don’t watch them out. Their imagination and their muscles need each other.
    Leontine Young (20th century)