Reference no: EM132780793

Question: You are given a deck containing N cards. While holding the deck facedown:

1. Deal all the cards facedown onto a table into Y piles like you would if you were playing with a group of people (i.e. card 1 to P1, card 2 to P2, ..., card Y to PY, card Y + 1 to P1, etc).

2. Combine all the piles into a deck by placing P1 onto P2, then P1+P2 onto P3, and so on. This is a round.

3. Pick up the deck from the table and repeat steps 1-2 until the deck is in the original order.

4. For each round, vary the pile count according to a repeating pattern. Start with 3 piles, then 4, then 5, then loop back to 3, then 4 and so on.

Write a program to determine how many rounds it will take to put a deck back into the original order. This will involve creating a data structure to represent the order of the cards. Do not use an array. This program should be written in C only. It should take a number of cards in the deck as a command line argument and write the result to stdout. Please ensure the program compiles and runs correctly (no pseudo-code). This isn't a trick question; it should be fairly straightforward.

Output how many rounds should be completed before the deck is adequately shuffled from the original deck for a person who is casually playing a game with cards. Provide your methodology in a comment block.