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

[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]

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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

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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]

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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

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

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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.

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what was your whole point then?

[arahant]

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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.

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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)

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 [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]