There are many ways to order a deck of 52 cards such that one would know the exact position of every card. The most obvious would be a standard new-deck-order, with Ace through King of every suit one after the other. However, I request of you, dear reader, to try to come up with such an algorithm that makes the deck "look" very random in the statistical sense, barring some 'loose' conditions:
- The algorithm should truly be some sort of mathematical algorithm - it should require minimal rote-memorization.
- One should be able to apply the algorithm to deduce the position of any card and the card given any position.
- This algorithm should be simple enough that one can apply it one's own head and take, say, less than 10 seconds or so to compute.
The current best stack I've found is something known as the "Breakthrough Card System", however while algorithmic, (and very pretty), it unfortunately lacks an 'nth formula', so to speak. i.e., if you wanted to know what the 37th card was, you'd have to know the 36th, and so on.
I sincerely apologize for the lack of precision in my request. It is hard to be precise about statistical concepts of which I have no bearing. All I have seen are other 'stacks' of cards that either do not look random, or don't have a simple enough algorithm.