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ThonTaddio t1_j6kios8 wrote

Not true. It’s unlikely that even something so seemingly simple as a deck of cards has, or ever will be, randomly shuffled in the same order. Ever.

There are 52! (factorial) possible random ways to order a deck of playing cards. That number is enormous - 8x10^67 (8 followed by 67 zeroes).

If every person on earth (8x10^9 people) shuffled a deck of cards once per second for the lifetime of the universe (4.16x10^27 seconds), no two decks would be the same. This would still be true if you ran the same calculation, but assumed there was an earth with 8 billion people around every star in the entire universe (1x10^24 stars) sitting there for 13.2 billion years shuffling cards every second.

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Soggy_Midnight980 t1_j6ledw9 wrote

So it’s possible. Might even have already happened. In fact, in the deck shuffle per second scenario there is a microscopic chance it happens each second.

It like trying to explain Mean time between failures. If it’s a million hours then there is 1 millionth of a chance per hour that the failure occurs.

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ThonTaddio t1_j6lemsg wrote

Sure, there’s a roughly 8*10^57 chance that it’s happened.

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Consistent_Paper_104 t1_j6ljwv7 wrote

Technically if you did this experiment in a classroom of 15 people it's possible 2 decks would be the same. However unlikely. Crazy isn't it.

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