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A Simple Pack Of Cards


Slophole

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I knew this before, but Stephen fry said it best.

 

 

"Take a deck of cards and shuffle it.

 

That pack of cards, believe it or not, has never before, in the history of our planet, been in that order.

 

How?

 

It's a simple mathematical fact. The order of cards is a gigantic number... It's a number that is known by mathematicians as "shriek;" you write it as "52!," which is 52 times 51, times 50, times 49, times 48 etc. These are all the possibilities in which a pack of cards can be, and the number is big 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,227,824,000,000,000,000 to be exact.

 

That number is so big that, were you to imagine that every star in our galaxy had a trillion plantes, each with a trillion people living on them... And eacfh of these people had a trillion packs of cards, and somehow they managed to shuffle them all in a thousand times a second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang... They would only just now be starting to repeat shuffles. So, I can say, wiht all the mathematical certainty that is possible, that this pack of cards has never been in this order before.

 

It's an absolute world first."

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