Card guessing and the birthday problem for sampling without replacement

Abstract

Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number of correct guesses under the best and worst strategies? We establish sharp asymptotics for both strategies. For the worst case, this answers a recent question of Diaconis, Graham, He and Spiro, who found the correct order. As part of the proof, we study the birthday problem for sampling without replacement using Stein's method.

28 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Comments are welcome!

References in corpus (3)

• Exchangeable pairs and Poisson approximation
• Card Guessing with Partial Feedback
• The Card Guessing Game: A generating function approach