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.

  • Steve@communick.news
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    2 days ago

    This is definitely mostly true.
    It does breakdown some when every new deck has the same starting order, and people frequently shuffle poorly. Those 52! possibilities shrink massively.

    • emb@lemmy.world
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      2 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.