Cycles in Austrian Solitaire

Abstract

Austrian Solitaire is a variation of Bulgarian Solitaire. It may be described as a card game, a method of asset inventory management, or a discrete dynamical system on integer partitions. We prove that the limit cycles in Austrian Solitaire do not depend on the initial configuration; in other words, each state space is connected. We show that a full Farey sequence completely characterizes these unique (and balanced) cycles.