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Card Magic: Pigeonhole Principle Explained

This document proposes a method for a magician to determine a hidden card from a sequence of 4 cards chosen from a set of 5 cards dealt to an assistant. There will always be at least 2 cards of the same suit in the 5 cards. The assistant hides 1 card of the matching suit and places the other in the first position. The order of different value cards indicates the number of "hops" needed to determine the hidden card. With only 4 cards, there are more possible combinations than sequences so a unique mapping is not possible.

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8 views2 pages

Card Magic: Pigeonhole Principle Explained

This document proposes a method for a magician to determine a hidden card from a sequence of 4 cards chosen from a set of 5 cards dealt to an assistant. There will always be at least 2 cards of the same suit in the 5 cards. The assistant hides 1 card of the matching suit and places the other in the first position. The order of different value cards indicates the number of "hops" needed to determine the hidden card. With only 4 cards, there are more possible combinations than sequences so a unique mapping is not possible.

Uploaded by

satyamkumarmod
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

CON Assignment- Match Making

Satyam Kumar Modi


December 2020

1 Introduction
The magician has total 52 cards. So,there are total
 
52
= 2598960
5

possible combinations of 5 cards. In each combination, we are going to have


atleast two cards which belong to the same suit. Now, the assistant needs to
choose a sequence of 4 cards out of the chosen 5 cards. Number of all possible
4 cards sequences are

52 × 51 × 50 × 49 = 6497400

. Lets call the set of all such 5 cards combinations as A and all 4 cards combi-
nations as B. Clearly, we can have a unique mapping for each combination in A
to B.
By pigeonhole principle, there will always be two cards such that they belong
to the same suit. What the assistant can do is hide any of the two cards that
are of the same suit. So, he/she can place the other card of the same suit in the
first place in the sequence of the 4 cards, so that the magician can get the suit
of the hidden card. Now we need to chose which card is to be kept hidden for
the magician to guess and which to show.

1
For this, follow this circular order, whenever we have two cards of different
dominations, the one that could be reached from the other in atmost 6 hops or
less in the clockwise direction should be kept hidden from the magician and the
card from which the search is to start has to be shown. Now, the question comes
how the magician will come to know how many hops to go? For this we can
have 6 different orders which could be symbolised by the help of the remaining
three cards. As they can be arranged in order of their domination. In case of
a tie, we can adopt an order of priority of suits to detect the sequence. There
could be a maximum of 6 possible orders. So, now the magician can easily guess
the hidden card.

2 Why it is not possible with 4 cards?


Here there can be a total of
 
52
= 270725
4

possible combination of 4 cards. For this we have just

52 × 51 × 50 = 132600

possible combination of 3 cards. So, the unique mapping is not possible in this
case, hence this could n’t be done.

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