[psandman]

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Why do you believe the shufflers are truley radom?

I ran an unshuffled deck through one of these machines and one might think that in the end two of the cards that were touching each other would still be touching each other after the machine was through, but that was not the case.

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Exercise for the reader. What are the odds that after a random shuffle two cards that were once next to each other will still be next to each other?

But you're right, Shufflemasters are not "truly random". They use a pseudo random number generator. I read through the patent for one of these things once and apparently there is no source of truly random numbers within. Which is a little sad since you'd think in a $15K box they could find room to put a source of real randomness, but probably not really a real world issue. It seeds the PRNG from variations in timing from human-entered events. If they did it right, and you'd hope Shufflemaster has people who understand this stuff, it'll be fine.

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There is no such thing as random other than as a purely theortical excerise.

The goal of a shuffle should never be randomness since that is unacheivable, rather the goal should be unpredictability.