OK, I just *may* have partaken of a little of the Devil's Cabbage this evening so forgive me, but still...

TIL that every time you shuffle[1] a deck of regular playing cards, it is very likely that no other deck of cards in the history of the world has ever been in that exact arrangement before[2].

1. Shuffle them well. And again. Etc.
2. Edit! Apparently of the order of 10^^68 possible arrangements. Again, I may be wrong!

Math-heads and statisticians will now either tell me to smoke less, or that I'm quite right. Either would be an acceptable outcome!

@bytebro
52! (i.e., 52 factorial, which is 52 x 51 x 50 ... x 1), equals 8.06581752 x 10^67 or 8 times (10 raised to the 67th power). I hadn't thought about it before, but it's quite possibly true.

@fifonetworks

I am unreasonably pleased that my trivial and somewhat hazed research got within an order of magnitude!

@bytebro
To amplify a little more on the subject... the real-world odds don’t necessarily match the solid math.

EXAMPLE 1: Consider the myth of it taking 100 years to crack a password of a certain length by brute force methods. If someone chooses a password like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab, and the brute force tool starts with “a” and works up in alphabetical order, the password will be cracked quicker than zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzy. And if the brute force tool is itself random, any password of any length may be cracked in the first ten attempts. In other words, cracking every password in a series won’t take the same length of time as the longest cracking time. In fact, only one password takes the longest cracking time.

EXAMPLE 2: You may be familiar with the Birthday Paradox. If there are 23 people in a room, there’s a 50 percent chance that two of them have the same birthday (month/day, not year/month/day). When there are 60 people in the same room, the odds of a duplicate birthday are over 99 percent.

So, while there are lots of combinations for the cards in the deck, we’ll never be sure if a duplicate happens or not. There’s no law in physics (or mathematics) that says all combinations of cards must occur before any combination can occur again.

@fifonetworks
<making notes to myself to ask silly questions when slightly stoned more often>

What a splendid evening. Thank you, and I now need to sleep and then re-read some of my old text books!