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.
- Initially, there are no piles. The first card dealt forms a new pile consisting of the single card.
- 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.
- 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:
“In the game of “Whist for two,” usually called “Correspondence,” the lady plays what card she likes: the gentleman simply follows suit. If she leads with “Queen of Diamonds,” however, he may, if he likes, offer the “Ace of Hearts”: and, if she plays “Queen of Hearts,” and he happens to have no Heart left, he usually plays “Knave of Clubs.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art ... is merely romantic fiction.... The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)