Kazumasa Shinagawa

Suthee Ruangwises, Kazumasa Shinagawa

UNO is a popular multiplayer card game. In each turn, a player has to play a card in their hand having the same number or color as the most recently played card. When having few people, adding virtual players to play the game can easily be done in UNO video games. However, this is a challenging task for physical UNO without computers. In this paper, we propose an unconventional protocol that can simulate virtual players using nothing but physical UNO cards. In particular, our protocol can uniformly select a valid card to play from each virtual player's hand at random, or report that none exists, without revealing the rest of its hand. The protocol can also be applied to simulate virtual players in other turn-based card or tile games where each player has to select a valid card or tile to play in each turn.

Kengo Miyamoto, Kazumasa Shinagawa

A pile-scramble shuffle is one of the most effective shuffles in card-based cryptography. Indeed, many card-based protocols are constructed from pile-scramble shuffles. This article aims to study the power of pile-scramble shuffles. In particular, for any directed graph $G$, we introduce a new protocol called "a graph shuffle protocol for $G$", and show that it can be implemented by using pile-scramble shuffles only. Our proposed protocol requires $2(n+m)$ cards, where $n$ and $m$ are the numbers of vertices and edges of $G$, respectively. The number of pile-scramble shuffles is $k+1$, where $1 \leq k \leq n$ is the number of distinct degrees of vertices of $G$. As an application, a random cut for $n$ cards, which is also an important shuffle, can be realized by $3n$ cards and two pile-scramble shuffles.

Yuji Hashimoto, Kazumasa Shinagawa, Koji Nuida et al.

We consider a problem, which we call secure grouping, of dividing a number of parties into some subsets (groups) in the following manner: Each party has to know the other members of his/her group, while he/she may not know anything about how the remaining parties are divided (except for certain public predetermined constraints, such as the number of parties in each group). In this paper, we construct an information-theoretically secure protocol using a deck of physical cards to solve the problem, which is jointly executable by the parties themselves without a trusted third party. Despite the non-triviality and the potential usefulness of the secure grouping, our proposed protocol is fairly simple to describe and execute. Our protocol is based on algebraic properties of conjugate permutations. A key ingredient of our protocol is our new techniques to apply multiplication and inverse operations to hidden permutations (i.e., those encoded by using face-down cards), which would be of independent interest and would have various potential applications.