View Single Post
Old 02-05-2008, 08:40 AM   #37
Flint
Snowflake
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Dystopia
Posts: 13,136
Okay, I hear what people are saying. You want more shuffles getting done, okay. Let’s look at that.

I’m going by HLJ’s calculation (I’m too lazy to do it myself) that in 9.e+33 permutations you would have a 50% chance of repeating the same shuffle.

I’m using the entire population of planet Earth (6,648,429,413), and I’ll have them shuffle one deck of cards per second, year-round. It would take 42,925,646,062,489,266.972805985537223 years to get through 9.e+33 permutations.

How long is that? Well, the Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old. It’s 9,454,988.1194910279675784109112819 times longer than that.

So, if every living person on the Earth shuffled one deck of cards per second, for 9 million times longer than the Earth has existed, there would be a 50% chance of the same shuffle coming up.

THE SAME EXACT SHUFFLE HAS NEVER HAPPENED, AND NEVER WILL HAPPEN. EVER.
__________________
******************
There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there
it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your
expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever
gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Terry Bozzio
Flint is offline   Reply With Quote