does the deck "change"? poker's version of schrodinger's cat

[mikech]

i'm aware that this is my 1600th post, at which point i become a "pooh-bah," but despite that significance i'm making the post in a low-traffic forum and on a topic that few ppl will likely find interesting. anyway.

in this thread (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=8931665&page=0&fpart=all &vc=1) fwf lamented over folding AA on the flop after he saw that the turn and river came ace-ace, and that he "would have" made quads against another player who flopped a set. i posted the following in his thread:


"hey philosophy major, scenarios like this are actually something i've been thinking about lately. on one hand, i feel that the universe would've reacted differently if you'd called or gone all-in, that there's some kind of quantum-physical indeterminacy even to a shuffled deck and you wouldn't (necessarily) have made quads, but the other side of the argument is that the deck was already established, so your action could not have affected it. what's your serious opinion on this?"


someone said that was the dumbest [censored] they'd ever read, and fwf even thought i was joking and defended me:


"in mike's defense he's just making fun of me because i talk about chaos theory a lot. he doesn't actually think the deck changes."


but no, i wasn't joking:


"schrodinger's cat yo. the cat is either alive or dead, it's like the established deck, but until the box is opened and we make the observation, the cat is both alive AND dead according to quantum physics. no?"


so, am i a loon? i have an admittedly shallow understanding of quantum physics and its philosophical implications, i hope that there are others more knowledgeable who will participate in this thread and share some insights. i honestly have been thinking about this quite a bit lately, since i've been playing live poker full-time for the past several months and situations similar to fwf's often occur where there is "results remorse."

[Magic_Man]

I'm no quantum physicist, and most of my understanding comes from books like "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters," "The Elegant Universe," and other books for non-physicists. However, a lot of people try to take quantum indeterminacy to the macro level and come up with these strange scenarios. My understanding is that once you get to this scale, the probability of such an event happening is effectively zero. For example, take electron tunneling. Quantum physics actually allows small particles to travel through a barrier, and in theory, these physics could be extended to the macro scale. There is a non-zero probability that you will walk through a wall in your house...but even if you walked into that wall all day and never rested, you could probably do it for as long as the current age of the universe and STILL have a negligible chance of walking through it. The quantum uncertainties really just don't extend to the macro scale. There is an interesting little segment in "The Elegant Universe" where the author pretends that Planck's constant is much larger, and strange things like this become commonplace.

A more interesting "shuffled deck" scenario that IS real is the "seat effect." Often a player will change seats and then lament a huge run of luck that befalls the next player to take their seat. Or possibly the new seat-taker will continue to receive cold cards, and the seat-changer will comment on how glad he is to have left. But once you change seats, everything changes. The way you throw your cards into the muck causes them to land in different locations in the discards. Even if every player mucked their cards exactly the same way, differences in play will mean that cards will enter the muck in a different order, and all future hands will be forever changed. I think that this is as close to the "butterfly effect" that we can realistically get in a game of cards.

~M^2

[FoxwoodsFiend]

I know practically nothing about quantum physics beyond a "physics for poets" class I took, but I'm inclined to think that this is just another example where people conflate epistemic issues with metaphysical issues.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
I know practically nothing about quantum physics beyond a "physics for poets" class I took, but I'm inclined to think that this is just another example where people conflate epistemic issues with metaphysical issues.

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you read this (http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Poets-Robert-March/dp/0072472170/sr=8-1/qid=1170110694/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4695659-3727924?ie=UTF8&s=books) book for that class? I read this during freshman year, it was really good.

[evank15]

[ QUOTE ]
However, a lot of people try to take quantum indeterminacy to the macro level and come up with these strange scenarios. My understanding is that once you get to this scale, the probability of such an event happening is [/b]effectively zero.[/b]

[/ QUOTE ]

And yet, still non-zero.

There's no "trying" to take things to macro scales. They already are.

[gumpzilla]

This is pretty much bunk, in my opinion. The uncertainty that people talk about with quantum mechanics really only applies at the microscopic level; by the time you get to macroscopic objects, the length of time over which they behave quantum mechanically (in terms of being probabilistic, exhibiting interference, things of that nature) gets to be pretty much zero. This is why the everyday world functions as you'd expect, and quantum mechanics is so weird.

[valenzuela]

The reason why the guy shouldnt feel remorse its because he was bound to make that desition and there was no way he could have acted in another way.

You are a total lunatic, just do the following. Put a deck listed on a certain way, leave the room come back and I guarantee you that the deck will remain the same.

[valenzuela]

Btw quantum physics isnt neccesarrilly correct.

[m_the0ry]

Absolutely.

Believe me there are many, many interpretations of what a "purely random" event means but I agree it is completely analogous to shrodinger's cat. Note that this is NOT an argument that the cards in the deck have x probability of physically moving through each other. This is an argument that, until a measurement is made on the deck, each card is a superposition of all cards that have not been measured. Preflop, for example, the deck is a superposition of the set of cards consisting of all 52 cards minus your two hole cards (exclusion principle - no two identical cards can exist in the same deck). After the flop, it is a superposition of the remaining 47 cards, so on and so forth. While I'm sure this claim will draw a lot of flak, I would argue that anyone who calculates outs (read: any competent poker player) is using the underlying principle of shrodinger's cat. The deck changes every time a measurement is made (new cards are shown to you).

For example lets say you go to the casino and the worlds most incompetent dealer just so happens to be there. You're on the river in a big pot heads up with a set of kings and an ace on the table. The dealer fumbles the deck and all of the cards land face up and you see there is only one ace in the remaining deck. The event of loss, as soon as this happens, rises from x probability (based on your reads, etc) to 1 (absolutely certain).

[mikech]

[ QUOTE ]
this is NOT an argument that the cards in the deck have x probability of physically moving through each other. This is an argument that, until a measurement is made on the deck, each card is a superposition of all cards that have not been measured.

[/ QUOTE ]
YES. this is exactly what i'm trying to say. posters talking about walking thru walls or thinking that i believe leaving a deck stacked in a certain order, then coming back to the room and expecting the order to have changed are completely missing the point.

[JayTee]

I'm no expert, but some thoughts

You can still see the cards so this scenario isn't really shielded from the outside environment. Which is what is required to prevent decoherence resulting in the collapse of the wave function. Is seeing the deck and not the faces enought to prevent this?

[valenzuela]

[ QUOTE ]

on one hand, i feel that the universe would've reacted differently if you'd called or gone all-in, that there's some kind of quantum-physical indeterminacy even to a shuffled deck and you wouldn't (necessarily) have made quads

[/ QUOTE ]

or the OP thinks that the deck could have changed or I suck at reading comprehension

[ChrisV]

I happen to think the Copenhagen Interpretation is rubbish anyway, but as JayTee said it would depend on whether the wave function were collapsed. In a shuffled deck of cards sitting on a table, I would say that it would have. For random numbers sitting on a computer somewhere the situation is less clear.

[mikech]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

on one hand, i feel that the universe would've reacted differently if you'd called or gone all-in, that there's some kind of quantum-physical indeterminacy even to a shuffled deck and you wouldn't (necessarily) have made quads

[/ QUOTE ]

or the OP thinks that the deck could have changed or I suck at reading comprehension

[/ QUOTE ]
i do have some difficulty articulating my feelings on the topic, as i'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher, but if you think my whole point was based on that half a sentence, then yes, you suck at reading comprehension.

[valenzuela]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

on one hand, i feel that the universe would've reacted differently if you'd called or gone all-in, that there's some kind of quantum-physical indeterminacy even to a shuffled deck and you wouldn't (necessarily) have made quads

[/ QUOTE ]

or the OP thinks that the deck could have changed or I suck at reading comprehension

[/ QUOTE ]
i do have some difficulty articulating my feelings on the topic, as i'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher, but if you think my whole point was based on that half a sentence, then yes, you suck at reading comprehension.

[/ QUOTE ]

what was your whole point then?

[arahant]

[ QUOTE ]
Absolutely.

Believe me there are many, many interpretations of what a "purely random" event means but I agree it is completely analogous to shrodinger's cat.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually it's not. Schrodinger's cat depends on a poison triggered by a quantum event. The system is incoherent in it's initial state. If, for example, you trained the cat to roll a die, and it died depending on the outcome, QM does not still predict that the cat is neither dead nor alive.

A deck of cards is coherent, or at best, a system of so many incoherent states that thermodynamic principles can be easily applied.

Once the deck is shuffled, the flop is determined.

Even if this WERE analagous to schrodingers cat, you can actually SEE the edges of the cards. Given a sufficiently powerful lense and an examination of the deck, in fact, you could tell the order of the cards based on their edges. Any wave function collapse has to have occured at that point.

[madnak]

My understanding of Shrodinger's Cat is that it's, first an foremost, and attempt to represent through analogy a concept that is very unintuitive. This is useful because there's no intuitive way to perceive quantum physics. However, there is an intuitive way to perceive a deck of cards, so regardless of whether the analogy might apply to the cards in some way, there's really no point using such an analogy in terms of playing cards (as far as I can see).

You could certainly go to the teeter-tottering edge of reality versus perception with this, but then you just get into raw philosophy and the whole Schrodinger's Cat concept becomes equally irrelevant.

[Dale Dough]

Multiverse theory (wiki) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(science))

Haven't read the Wiki yet, but read similar material. I had a lengthy explanation ready that basically agreed with you; then I realized that you already know that. Blah blah random event blah blah measurement. What you and the others said.

As an interesting aside, I recall reading about a quantum theorist who theorized about a 'proof' to himself by aiming a machine gun at himself that either fires or doesn't fire like a few hundred times, with 99% probability of firing each shot. If the muliple universe theory is true, he must survive in some of them. If he is still alive after the incident, at least he in that universe will know that he's right with .999999etc probability. I guess he backed out because he didn't want to leave his assistant to clean up the mess and/or have to explain himself in the other 999999etc universes. Wuss.

[gumpzilla]

Schrodinger's cat was a thought experiment proposed by Schrodinger to show that quantum mechanics, followed to its extremes, led to consequences which just seemed preposterous to him. The key idea that he objected to was the idea that macroscopic objects (the cat, in this case) could be in a superposition of two different states, which is a perfectly natural thing for, say, a hydrogen atom to do. The weirdness of it is because we never observe such a thing.

While I wouldn't say that the problem has been perfectly addressed, one quite reasonable approach (and the one I alluded to earlier in this thread) is through the phenomenon of decoherence. This is what you get when you take what we usually conveniently pretend is a closed quantum system (the entangled cat/atom pair) and include the rest of the universe. Calculations with toy models designed to simulate this kind of setup show that, in a technical way, over a small period of time the system moves from exhibiting quantum mechanical properties (coherent superpositions of multiple eigenstates) to basically exhibiting the properties that you'd expect of a classical statistical ensemble. The cat will be dead or alive with 50% probability, and we won't know, but it isn't in a superposition, and it's already taken care of before we open the box. If you like, you can sort of think of this as the rest of the world implicitly "measuring" the system and thus performing the infamous collapse for you.

Anyway, the bigger the system, the bigger the problem of decoherence gets, to my understanding.

[Dale Dough]

Hm I read the link I posted, it doesn't really apply to this case as much as I thought it would. Basically, the idea is one universe for each set of outcomes for things that are truly random. Your job at the poker table is to figure out which universe you are more likely to be in /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[FortunaMaximus]

[ QUOTE ]
Hm I read the link I posted, it doesn't really apply to this case as much as I thought it would. Basically, the idea is one universe for each set of outcomes for things that are truly random. Your job at the poker table is to figure out which universe you are more likely to be in /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

Why? /images/graemlins/tongue.gif Keep making the correct decisions and you'll be ahead in a majority of these universes... /images/graemlins/shocked.gif

[oneeye13]

you're wrong, but it might help you sleep

[valenzuela]

I have never ever studied pysics but I like classical pysics, it just seems right to me.

[ChrisV]

Multiverse is something different, you're looking for Many Worlds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_worlds).

I think the many worlds interpretation is lame - it doesn't really "explain" anything, it just ignores Ockham's Razor and infinitely multiplies entities to define the problem out of existence. Unless there's some way to prove the existence of these other universes, I don't think it's a much better explanation than "God did it".

I like the Transactional Interpretation - there is a Wiki article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation) but it's pretty incomprehensible. If you're interested, I recommend "Schroedinger's Kittens" by John Gribbin for an easily understood overview.

[Metric]

There are two forms of uncertainty in quantum mechanics. One is related to the fact that a given state doesn't predict a pre-determined value for some observable -- i.e. whether the cat is alive or not.

The 2nd type of uncertainty is simply due to a lack of knowledge of the actual state of the system.

Both are fundamental, but the 2nd type also exists in classical mechanics, and it is this type that exists in a shuffled deck. I.E. all practical uncertainties in a shuffled deck come from ignorance of the full state, rather than the fact that the state is a superposition.

[Magic_Man]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
this is NOT an argument that the cards in the deck have x probability of physically moving through each other. This is an argument that, until a measurement is made on the deck, each card is a superposition of all cards that have not been measured.

[/ QUOTE ]
YES. this is exactly what i'm trying to say. posters talking about walking thru walls or thinking that i believe leaving a deck stacked in a certain order, then coming back to the room and expecting the order to have changed are completely missing the point.

[/ QUOTE ]

Someone more knowledgable in QP can correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I understand. In some interpretations of QP, quantum particles really do have a specific position and velocity, but we just cannot know them both simultaneously. The process of measuring one of the variables changes the other, and it is impossible (probably) to construct a measuring device that does not have this problem. On the other hand, with playing cards, we absolutely can measure both the velocity and position of the objects. This is why the deck is determined once it is shuffled.

[Magic_Man]

[ QUOTE ]
Btw quantum physics isnt neccesarrilly correct.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not necessarily, but it is possibly the most-verified theory in all of physics. It makes stunningly accurate predictions that have been checked time and time again.

[Skidoo]

The state of the cat is determined by whether a single unobserved quantum event did or did not happen, so you could say it is both dead and alive in superposition. A deck of cards is nothing like that, obviously.

[Skidoo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Btw quantum physics isnt neccesarrilly correct.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not necessarily, but it is possibly the most-verified theory in all of physics. It makes stunningly accurate predictions that have been checked time and time again.

[/ QUOTE ]

They said the same thing about physics in the 1890s.