In the article “Drill Bits,” Terence Kelly delves into the complex realm of fair shuffling and the importance of unbiased randomness. From shuffling amino acid sequences in bioinformatics to draft lotteries for military service, the stakes are high when it comes to fairness. Kelly highlights the prevalence of biased shuffling in both code and advice, emphasizing the need for meticulous attention to combinatorics. He provides a detailed analysis of biased shuffling errors, particularly in the use of the standard C pseudorandom number generator. Kelly presents an unbiased shuffling algorithm developed by Durstenfeld in 1964, offering a solution to the challenges of seed bias and other prevalent biases in shuffling algorithms. Fairness is key, and achieving true randomness is crucial in applications like online poker and beyond.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3664645