variety of denominations in colmns

arpy2912

Game: klondike3
Game #: 1638766556

The frequency with which a card of a particular denomination appearing in multiple columns
in a given game is inconsistent with that same development occurring with a physical deck
of cards. Can this be altered? This is not specific to this game number but appears in all the
games I have played.

david

In any given game we shuffle the cards and then deal them from a virtual deck in the same way that you'd do it if you were dealing it with a real card deck.

So the real question is, does our shuffle work properly. Unfortunately we know that it isn't a perfect shuffle. Due to an algorithmic bug on our part we implemented a shuffle that over-represents certain deck layouts.

Why haven't we fixed it? Inertia. We have roughly 250 million games in our databases and we'd like to mark them so that we know which use the old shuffle and which use the new one. Seems easy, but we've been resisting it. It'll happen someday. At the same time we'll switch to a better random number generator.

Now, with all that being said, I find it a little hard to believe that what you are noticing is our slightly imperfect shuffling technique.

There are 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000 possible combination of cards in a deck. Of those, we only use 4,294,967,296 (that's still a pretty big number). Odds are that some of those 4 billion shuffles are dupes. But the odds of a player ever seeing one are going to be very low.

The human brain is very good at finding patterns and quite often we find them where there are none. I think that may be happening in this case.

-David