The mental poker problem concerns how to play a fair game of poker without the need for a trusted dealer.

Today this is an important problem due to the sharp rise in interest in online poker. The problem arises because of the need for a way to ensure the players a fair game without needing to trust the dealer (usually an internet gambling site). For instance the dealer might give some players an advantage in the cards dealt, giving them an upper hand. This problem can be compared to the problem of flipping a coin over distance.

Several protocols for doing this have been suggested, the first by Adi Shamir, Ron Rivest and Len Adleman (the creators of the RSA-encyption protocol).

References

• Goldwasser, S. and Micali, S. 1982. Probabilistic encryption & how to play mental poker keeping secret all partial information. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM Symposium on theory of Computing.

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