Ghost Leg

Ghost Leg (Chinese: 畫鬼腳), known in Japan as Amidakuji (阿弥陀籤, "Amida lottery", so named because the paper was folded into a fan shape resembling Amida's halo) or in Korea as Sadaritagi (사다리타기, literally "ladder climbing"), is a method of lottery designed to create random pairings between two sets of any number of things, as long as the number of elements in each set is the same. This is often used to distribute things among people, where the number of things distributed is the same as the number of people. For instance, chores or prizes could be assigned fairly and randomly this way.

It consists of vertical lines with horizontal lines connecting two adjacent vertical lines scattered randomly along their length; the horizontal lines are called "legs". The number of vertical lines equals the number of people playing, and at the bottom of each line there is an item - a thing that will be paired with a player. The general rule for playing this game is: choose a line on the top, and follow this line downwards. When a horizontal line is encountered, follow it to get to another vertical line and continue downwards. Repeat this procedure until reaching the end of the vertical line. Then the player is given the thing written at the bottom of the line.

If the elements written above the Ghost Leg are treated as a sequence, and after the Ghost Leg is used, the same elements are written at the bottom, then the starting sequence has been transformed to another permutation. Hence, Ghost Leg can be treated as a kind of permuting operator.

As an example, consider assigning roles in a play to actors.

Another process involves creating the ladder beforehand, then concealing it. Then people take turns choosing a path to start from at the top. If no part of the amidakuji is concealed, then it is possible to fix the system so that you are guaranteed to get a certain pairing, thus defeating the idea of random chance.

Part of the appeal for this game is that, unlike random chance games like rock, paper, scissors, amidakuji will always create a 1:1 correspondence, and can handle arbitrary numbers of pairings (although pairing sets with only two items each would be fairly boring). It is guaranteed that two items at the top will never have the same corresponding item at the bottom, nor will any item on the bottom ever lack a corresponding item at the top.

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Wikipedia