I’ve always liked the fact there has likely never been a well-shuffled deck of cards in the same order/arrangement after the shuffle since there 8x10^67 possible outcomes 😂🤯
Thinking about that factorial makes me want to compare it to things...number of grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Maybe compare it to how many water molecules are in all the water on earth. Stuff like that
Hi Zach, as you brought up the number, my mind also started thinking, if it is really unlikely. I am aware the 52! is a really huge number, but in order to make a statement about the likelihood we need an idea how often cards have been shuffled so far. Consider the hundreds or thousands of years, people playing cards. They shuffled and shuffled and shuffled all over the world. I really have no idea how to approximate the number of occurred shufflings, but it would be really interesting. Perhaps Lawrence, Penn, or Teller can jump in here to help us out ;)
Thanks Lawrence, I also started to think along this line. Assuming there are a billion people shuffling, they still have to shuffle around 10^59 times to have a very slight chance to come up with the same deck.
I’ve always liked the fact there has likely never been a well-shuffled deck of cards in the same order/arrangement after the shuffle since there 8x10^67 possible outcomes 😂🤯
Thinking about that factorial makes me want to compare it to things...number of grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Maybe compare it to how many water molecules are in all the water on earth. Stuff like that
you will be pleased to know it is far less than the number of grains of sand...
Hi Zach, as you brought up the number, my mind also started thinking, if it is really unlikely. I am aware the 52! is a really huge number, but in order to make a statement about the likelihood we need an idea how often cards have been shuffled so far. Consider the hundreds or thousands of years, people playing cards. They shuffled and shuffled and shuffled all over the world. I really have no idea how to approximate the number of occurred shufflings, but it would be really interesting. Perhaps Lawrence, Penn, or Teller can jump in here to help us out ;)
There’s gotta be a way to spherical-cow this 😂
Everyone on earth could shuffle once a day, and it would still take longer than the age of the universe to exhaust all combinations.
Thanks Lawrence, I also started to think along this line. Assuming there are a billion people shuffling, they still have to shuffle around 10^59 times to have a very slight chance to come up with the same deck.
I laughed but I found the actual number...😂
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000