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The Incomprehensible Scale of 52!

But Why?
312K subscribers
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7.3M views 4 years ago
One of my favorite fun facts to share with someone is how no matter how implausible it seems, every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you've produced a sequence of cards that has never existed before. It's of course natural to doubt or even disagree with this. After all, 52! just cannot be fit into any type of visualization with an object we are familiar with. So we cant mentally picture just how immense it is. For this reason I like to say there are an infinite ways to shuffle a deck of cards. Since no human nor humanity itself could ever possibly produce every single combination. Seriously. If humanity managed to become some kind of card shuffling empire and managed to shuffle a trillion unique decks a second since the start of the universe you legitimately wouldn't accomplish anything. I cannot explain with words how large 52! is. As unique as each individual order of cards is, more so is the person you are. Not even considering the genetic possibilities for a person but the life decisions and experiences you've encountered throughout. You may not feel it. But it's pretty crazy that you exist. The sand calculations I just took as an amalgam of the tons of different rough estimates I can find on the web. It ranges from 10^18 up to 10^25. ...more
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The Incomprehensible Scale of 52!
223KLikes
7,355,107Views
2020Sep 24
One of my favorite fun facts to share with someone is how no matter how implausible it seems, every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you've produced a sequence of cards that has never existed before. It's of course natural to doubt or even disagree with this. After all, 52! just cannot be fit into any type of visualization with an object we are familiar with. So we cant mentally picture just how immense it is. For this reason I like to say there are an infinite ways to shuffle a deck of cards. Since no human nor humanity itself could ever possibly produce every single combination. Seriously. If humanity managed to become some kind of card shuffling empire and managed to shuffle a trillion unique decks a second since the start of the universe you legitimately wouldn't accomplish anything. I cannot explain with words how large 52! is. As unique as each individual order of cards is, more so is the person you are. Not even considering the genetic possibilities for a person but the life decisions and experiences you've encountered throughout. You may not feel it. But it's pretty crazy that you exist. The sand calculations I just took as an amalgam of the tons of different rough estimates I can find on the web. It ranges from 10^18 up to 10^25.

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But Why?

312K subscribers