How to Play Old Maid with Virtual Players

Old Maid is a popular card game. While typically played with three or more players, it is less enjoyable with only two people. To address this, we propose a protocol to create a virtual player, Carol, by making use of card-based cryptography when only two people, Alice and Bob, are available to play Old Maid. Specifically, we design a card-based protocol to remove any pair of cards having the same number in Carol’s hand (namely, the virtual player’s hand) without leaking any information about Carol’s hand (more than necessary); our protocol uses additional cards aside from playing cards that are used in Old Maid.