Tue 13 Sep 2005
A deck of cards in the same order twice?
Posted by David under geek, philosophizing
[3] Comments
Jeremy recently passed along to me a conjecture that he’d heard:
>if you shuffle a deck of cards well, then it’s likely that never in history has a deck of cards been in that exact order.
I mentioned this to Sue, Michael and Megan in Portland, and there was general disbelief. I hadn’t done the math, but was inclined to believe it, because I knew 52 factorial was a really big number. Well, here’s the math, I believe the conjecture.