What is the Perfect Shuffle

Abstract

When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck. Unfortunately, human intuition for probability tends to lead us astray. For a standard 52-card deck of playing cards, the event is actually extremely likely. This report will attempt to elucidate how to answer this surprisingly difficult combinatorial question directly using rook polynomials.