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User avatar #126 - Crusader ONLINE (01/24/2013) [-]
Wait, cards have been around for more than a century, at least 2 I believe.
I am sure that no matter how you shuffle, you are going to get an order that people have seen before
User avatar #163 to #126 - Korosia (01/24/2013) [-]
Yeah, I was about to argue with this one too, until I did the maths. The number of ways a deck can be ordered is 52! (52*51*50*49...) which comes out as 8 x 10^67. Just as a reference, the number of atoms in the known universe is about 10^78.

If cards have been around for exactly 5 centuries, then there's been 182000 days since their invention. Let's assume that there has been exactly 7 billion people on the planet consistently for those 5 centuries (there definitely hasn't been). The number of seconds in a day is 86400 so:

(8E67)/ (182000*7E12*86400) = 7.3E44

So for humankind to have seen every possible combination of cards, everybody who has lived in the past 500 years would have needed to have spent every second of every day shuffling cards, at a rate of 7 billion billion billion billion billion shuffles a second. Even if people had shuffled at a rate of 1 shuffle per second, we'd have only seen 2.3E-38 percent of all possible combinations.

If I've done the maths correctly, this is the equivalent of taking our observable universe, lining 100,000 of them in a row and measuring the distance between the 2 edges. If that represents total combinations, then 7 billion people shuffling once a second since cards were invented would represent the diameter of one atom.

tl;dr maths is awesome
User avatar #152 to #126 - sausageparty (01/24/2013) [-]
52! is a pretty large number
User avatar #139 to #126 - smokedmeatlog (01/24/2013) [-]
Its are 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (10^67) possibilities.
User avatar #149 to #139 - Crusader ONLINE (01/24/2013) [-]
Standard deck has been used for 500 years.
It has been world wide for at least 200 I know that at least.
Card game takes what, 30 minutes?
That's 48 a day
48x365.25 = 17532
17532 games per year
17532x200 = 3506400

That is with a single card game going at any given time.
Think of how many people are playing solitaire, at casinos, etc. at any given time, and suddenly you can multiply that by MILLIONS, lets say 15 000 000 at any given time, that's from vegas to atlantic city, niagara falls, buffalo, seneca, orlando, native casinos, and that's just north america, think of China, Japan, Europe, etc, 15 000 000/6 000 000 000 is not that hard to think of

And it still only comes to 52 596 000 000 000

I guess that's right.

Imagine all the magicians doing card tricks, etc.
Suddenly it keeps going up, though I am starting to beleive in the random fact given.
User avatar #156 to #149 - smokedmeatlog (01/24/2013) [-]
Plus its not going to be different every single time, like there has to be 10^67 shuffles then someone shuffles it exactly like the first ever shuffle. 2 people could have gotten the same shuffle within the first 1000 shuffles. Unlikely, yet possibru.
#136 to #126 - cartergrey (01/24/2013) [-]
I thought it was 						********					 too, but I googled it and it's real. Also, playing cards have been around for approx. 5 centuries.
User avatar #145 to #136 - Jewssassin (01/24/2013) [-]
got the link?
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