I am new to magic as of June 2019. I got to a late start at the age of 48! In this short time of over just a few years I have made many friends in the magic community.
I am obsessed with everything related to memorized deck and stack work for some reason; it just fascinates me; I have a real passion for it.
I am also familiar with computer programming, and lately I have been having fun exploring stacks with a program I wrote in Java. It starts with a base stack, and transforms it a myriad of ways, doing up to about about a billion or so transformations of a single ordered deck. For each of those billion iterations, I do up 728 deals per transformed deck: 52 cuts for 2 to 8 player Hold’em & Poker deals, searching for certain deal criteria such as royal flushes, four-of-a-kinds, Dead Man’s Hand etc.. So that’s like 750 billion deals in the course of a day or two.
I discovered a good transformation with my program for a Si Stebbins based deck. One that allowed me to end up in a random looking tetradistic stack, which also allowed me to easily deal royal flush deals of any suit for any number of players. I used Patrick Redford’s method which is used for getting into The Redford Stack from Si Stebbins, i.e. dialing a phone number, as explained in his absolutely wonderful book Temporarily Out of Order. This discovery with my computer program is how I ended up with this stack. I dialed every possible tetradistic phone number and found one that works well to accomplish want I needed. You can use this phone number to dial into Tetra-Red from Stebbins as well as dial back to Stebbins from Tetra-Red.
I do come up with ideas magicians appreciate, but please keep in mind I am new to the magic community, so please forgive me if there are any missing credits, errors or better ways of doing things in this document. I will update this document along the way to correct any errors, omitted credits along with any improvements.
Jennifer Gwinn
September 15, 2021
Hi Jennifer,
I am also an IT professional and works with memorized decks. My friend Allan told me about your tetra red stack. I also enjoy programs that allow to play with stacks, any chance you would share the Java program you wrote?
Thanks for leaving a comment. Hope you enjoy the stack.
I am not ready to share the code at this moment. It’s kind of a mess and needs a lot of clean up. Maybe someday though!
Have a beautiful day!
I am a CS teacher and magician who has also worked with Si Stebbins deck. I went in the opposite direction in teaching students how to code the various tricks WITHOUT using any data structures.
Was fun showing off some when a college CS prof told me it couldn’t be done without data structures.