Information about the winner and the solution
deadline: june, 1994 Cards are lovely. They have an order, a purpose, a reason. But once you take them out of the box, and start CUTTING them, and SHUFFLING them, and FLIPPING them ... it's real hard to get them back to where they started! That's the challenge of the next POTM! For an illustration, let's assume I have a deck with only eight cards, (call them ABCDabcd), let me define those operations a bit better: a CUT transforms ABCDabcd -> abcdABCD a SHUFFLE transforms ABCDabcd -> aAbBcCdD (top card changes) a FLIP transforms ABCDabcd -> dcbaDCBA The question: What do I have to do to a deck that looks like: dbDBcaCA to get it back into ABCDabcd original starting order? The answer: CUT, then SHUFFLE, then FLIP (obviously). dbDBcaCA -> caCAdbDB caCAdbDB -> dcbaDCBA dcbaDCBA -> ABCDabcd (voila!) For the POTM, I'll give your program a deck in disarray (up to 52 cards). Your program will have to tell me what operations to perform (CUTS, SHUFFLES, and FLIPS) in order to return the deck to its pristine unmixed state.