Card Magic and True Randomness
summary
A live experiment mixes riffle shuffles, deliberately turned face‑up cards shuffled into face‑down piles, and audience shufflers to test real entropy versus human bias. Three precise predictions are written beforehand and checked on stage: 23 cards face up, 16 black face-up cards, and a final claim about red suits that fails when the six of diamonds appears, highlighting how predictable patterns beat naive notions of randomness.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction to randomness and bias
- 0:27Demonstrating randomness with a deck of cards
- 1:04Audience members perform riffle shuffle
- 1:43Mixing face-up and face-down cards
- 2:19First prediction: 23 cards face up
- 3:04Second prediction: 16 black face-up cards
- 3:37Third prediction fails—sort of
- 4:00Time travel to fix the outcome (humorous close)
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