Reading recommendation from the Snapshots editorial team
Snapshot No. 5/2023: "Cutoff Phenomenon: Surprising Behaviour in Card Shuffling and other Markov Chains" by Isabelle Baraquin, Nadia Lafrenière and Katharina Schuh
This snapshot compares two techniques of shuffling a deck of cards, asking how long it will take to shuffle the cards until a "well-mixed deck" is obtained. Surprisingly, the number of shuffles can be very different for very similar looking shuffling techniques.