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Is it safe to say that it's almost certain that no two people have ever shuffled a deck of cards in the exact same order?
by SwiftyBug 2y ago
Is it safe to say that it's almost certain that no two people have ever shuffled a deck of cards in the exact same order?
- immibis 2y agoNo, due to suboptimal shuffling strategies. If you shuffle exactly the wrong way, you can even end up with the cards in their original order.
- RyanCavanaugh 2y agoYep, this. Matt Parker makes a convincing argument that multiple people have accidently performed a perfect Faro shuffle when trying to randomize a new deck of cards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-b-QJZdVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-b-QJZdVA
- Workaccount2 2y agoGiven the set of people who can competently shuffle a deck of cards. No, there has never been an identical deck, and there never will be. This would be true even if every human ever dedicated their entire life to randomly shuffling decks looking for a repeat. Even if all compute on earth was focused on shuffling as many decks as fast as possible, we still wouldn't ever get two identical decks. Even after hundreds of millions of trillions of years. The odds of getting two identical shuffles is somewhere around the odds of picking the correct sand grain sized piece of matter, out of all matter in the Milky Way.
- RAM-bunctious 2y agoThat would only be safe if you assumed everyone shuffled well. The likelihood that more than one person used a poor or lazy shuffling technique on a brand new deck of cards seems significant.