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Page 7 of 9 Shuffling of Cards The use of a fair and unpredictable shuffle algorithm is critical to a fair poker game. The three goals of a shuffling algorithm are: correctness, lack of bias, and lack of predictability. Correctness means that cards don't appear more than once. Lack of bias means that without knowledge of the state of the random-number generator, at any given time when there are N cards remaining in the deck, the likelihood of any given card being chosen is 1/N. And Lack of predictability means that when denied direct access to the state of the random number generator, an observer will not be able to predict the next card with a likelihood greater than 1/N (or less than 1/N either).
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