*stephen

52 shriek =
Factorial
52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48... all the way down to 1.

= 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.

It's about the same number as the number of atoms in the Milky Way. Mindbogglingly huge.

It is, but it does NOT guarantee that each shuffle is unique. Hugely unlikely, yes. Guaranteed, no.

Random is the key word here. But humans like to put things in order, and they are not all master shufflers like Mr. Frye. So I can say that some specific card combinations obtained from poorly shuffled, brand new packs, or during games where you match colors or sort numbers, have been obtained many times. Or maybe 2-3 times at least, since the beginning of times, maybe...

>> ^Stormsinger:

It is, but it does NOT guarantee that each shuffle is unique. Hugely unlikely, yes. Guaranteed, no.


QFT.

...but this does make it unlikely those trillions of of trillions of card-shuffling bizzaro aliens are anywhere near finished yet.

Dara O'Brien is meant to be a highly qualified physicist, dunno how he could let that slip.

Yeah, but nobody named Stephen Fry, sitting on that chair, at that exact same time has ever done that before! That's a guarantee!

>> ^Stormsinger:

It is, but it does NOT guarantee that each shuffle is unique. Hugely unlikely, yes. Guaranteed, no.

pfft
I thought he was going to sneeze with his eyes open.

Thing is, if he starts at new deck order and uses "weave" shuffles then there can't be THAT much deviation. If you do a perfect weave, a,b,a,b etc then after 8 such shuffles you'll arrive back at new deck order. I mean ok, its hard to do a perfect weave, and weaving the cards the same way as somebody 4 or 5 times in a row is still small odds, but its still a lot larger odds than 1/52!

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't assume our shuffling techniques really truly randomise the order of the cards.

*dead

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