Thread (1 of 2)
The other day I off-handedly posted something about how every well-shuffled deck of cards is essentially unique, something I've heard from various scientific sources, and mathematically the numbers are astronomical. There are 52 factorial (written as "52!" or 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 .. and so on down to 1, so around 8 with 67 zeroes on the end) different combinations in a standard deck of cards, a number in the same ballpark as the estimated number of atoms in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
In the replies someone pushed back with the argument that the birthday paradox makes this false. If 23 people (out of 365 possible birthdays) is all it takes to get a more-likely-than not chance of a collision, then surely all the millions of shuffles happening all over the world every day would quickly add up to a collision with 52! possibilities as well, right? It seems intuitive, and admittedly I hadn't done the maths myself, so I ended up deleting the original post ... but ...
Joshua Byrd
npub1m0…umqsy
2026-07-09 14:18:19 UTC
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npub1m0ew054uctaqtq370nh6ktlnfaczgnfu9q9upu884yl2r5tefh9ssumqsyPublished at
2026-07-09 14:18:19 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Thread (1 of 2)\n\nThe other day I off-handedly posted something about how every well-shuffled deck of cards is essentially unique, something I've heard from various scientific sources, and mathematically the numbers are astronomical. There are 52 factorial (written as \"52!\" or 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 .. and so on down to 1, so around 8 with 67 zeroes on the end) different combinations in a standard deck of cards, a number in the same ballpark as the estimated number of atoms in the entire Milky Way galaxy. \n\nIn the replies someone pushed back with the argument that the birthday paradox makes this false. If 23 people (out of 365 possible birthdays) is all it takes to get a more-likely-than not chance of a collision, then surely all the millions of shuffles happening all over the world every day would quickly add up to a collision with 52! possibilities as well, right? It seems intuitive, and admittedly I hadn't done the maths myself, so I ended up deleting the original post ... but ...",
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