With all of the truly amazing feats of calculation that computers can perform, it seems ironic that what would appear to be a simple random shuffling of a deck would have to be accomplished at such computational cost. It is curious to me that the illusion of chaos must be created, in effect, by fooling the system.

In any case, though, I believe your idea of a Solitaire Contest (presenting identical spreads to all contestants) would do much to clear up some of the unexplained variances in Solitaire performance which occurred during the initial trials. Plus, I think it would be a lot of fun.