Kruskal count

The Kruskal count (also known as Kruskal's principle, Dynkin–Kruskal count, Dynkin's counting trick, Dynkin's card trick, coupling card trick or shift coupling) is a probabilistic concept originally demonstrated by the Russian mathematician Evgenii Borisovich Dynkin in the 1950s or 1960s discussing coupling effects and rediscovered as a card trick by the American mathematician Martin David Kruskal in the early 1970s as a side-product while working on another problem. It was published by Kruskal's friend Martin Gardner and magician Karl Fulves in 1975. This is related to a similar trick published by magician Alexander F. Kraus in 1957 as Sum total and later called Kraus principle.

"Kruskal's principle" redirects here. For Kruskal's method, see Kruskal's algorithm.
"Sum Total" redirects here. For the statistical quantity, see Total sum of squares.
"Dynkin's card trick" redirects here. For optimal stopping problems, see Dynkin games.

Besides uses as a card trick, the underlying phenomenon has applications in cryptography, code breaking, software tamper protection, code self-synchronization, control-flow resynchronization, design of variable-length codes and variable-length instruction sets, web navigation, object alignment, and others.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.