In fact, 99.999999% is an extremely low estimate. The number of ways that a deck of cards can be shuffled is 52! Which is equal to 8065817517094387857166063685640376697528950544088327782400000000000 possibilities.

If you shuffled cards every second from the birth of the universe until now, you still wouldn’t even come close (statistically) to getting the same arrangement twice.

  • emb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    I always think that when I see this fact - what counts as a shuffle? If I sloppily cut the deck once and reassemble, that’s most likely not unique. I wonder how many moves before a shuffle is statistically close to a random order. I’m guessing just a few, but I don’t really know.