When you added 6 and 7 in first grade and carried the 1, you did the same math a Las Vegas dealer runs when shuffling cards. Persi Diaconis proved it in 2009. Nobody had noticed for 200 years. The paper is 12 pages. It is on his Stanford website. It also explains why markets do not behave the way you think they do.
The paper is called "Adding Numbers and Shuffling Cards." Its central finding is that the "carries" you produce when adding long columns of numbers form a Markov chain with a specific transition matrix. The exact same matrix appears when you analyze how quickly a shuffled deck of cards becomes truly random. The connection is not metaphorical. The matrices are the same, entry by entry.
Diaconis discovered this because he had spent 30 years thinking about both problems separately. He had proved in 1992 that a deck of cards needs exactly seven shuffles to become random. He had written about arithmetic in earlier work. One day the two matrices lined up. Two problems that looked entirely different were mathematical siblings that had never met.
The connection extends. The same structure appears in the theory of Foulkes characters, in generating functions, in Hopf algebras, in the casino shelf-shuffling machines that automatically shuffle decks. All of them are the same math wearing different costumes.
Diaconis's real point: patterns that look random are not random. They are structure you have not yet found. The carry in your arithmetic is not random. The shuffle in your dealer's hands is not random. The candle on your chart is not random. All three are the same math, and Diaconis has been trying to point at it for 50 years.
His signature line, said in a thousand lectures:
"There is no such thing as a random number, only a number whose bias you have not yet found."
The lesson: two things that look completely different can be mathematically identical. Your eye cannot tell which is which. The math can, and the math has been free since 1713.
Diaconis is 81. He still teaches at Stanford. He still shuffles decks. He still adds numbers by hand for fun. He still refuses to believe anything is truly random. Casinos still call him. Wall Street still doesn't.
How to code with Kimi K3 (better than Fable and no restrictions) today:
- Ask Codex or Claude Code to install OpenCode (yes it will 😂!)
- Go to https://t.co/XcwJM0YyGa, make an account, pay for membership $19/mo, get an API key at https://t.co/JstMqGOAlA
- Run OpenCode, do /connect and connect to Kimi Code, paste API key
- I recommend set to BUILD mode with Shift+Tab, u can set bypass permissions (like I do in Claude Code always) in /settings
@peeleraja What is this kallis nonsense - I don’t remember one great innings from that guy where he turned a test or a series single-handedly! - Gary f*ing Sobers ?!? 🙄
I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant.
But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone):
Founders / Founding Team Members
Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral
Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI
Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI
Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple
Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics
Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw.
Professors
Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT
Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University
Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University
Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University
Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto
Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC
Research Scientists
Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab
Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI
Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI
Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI
Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral
Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind
Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind
Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind
Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind
Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI
Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic
Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon