Marvelous properties
The economist Paul Romer notes the astonishing fact that if you thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, chances are practically 100 percent that the resulting arrangement of cards has never before existed.
Never.
Each time you shuffle a deck, you produce an arrangement of cards that exists for the first and only time in history. The arithmetic works that way. For a very small number of items, the number of possible arrangements -- which item is first, which item is second, which is third, and so on -- is small. Three items, for example, can be arranged only six different ways. But the number of possible arrangements grows very large very quickly. The number of ways to arrange five items is 120. For 10 items it's 3,628,800. For 15 items it's 1,307,674,368,000. The number of different ways to arrange 52 items is 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.
This number is so enormous that no human can comprehend it. By way of comparison, the number of ways to arrange a mere 20 items is 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 -- a number larger than the number of seconds that elapse in the course of 10 billion years. And this number is microscopic compared to 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.
Despite all this, Sarge continues to complain that he sees the same crappy hand time after time after time...
4 comments:
Amazing isn't it, though, that the three of clubs acts so much like the three of hearts and three of diamonds?
When we look at functions the cards play, we see that the number of types of hands we get are actually much smaller than the number listed. And one function of a hand is "the useless function of no worth function."
Well then, I think you need to take this study to the next level, and relate it to spades. Because they talk about the sequence of cards, you have the chance of getting the same 13 cards more than once, just dealt to you in a different sequence. Start from there.
exactly - if I get the eight of clubs in every hand, for approximately my entire life, it will never ever help - whether I get it first, seventh or tenth...
I beat you with the eight of clubs.
AH, that's funny...
So unless you get the top 6 spades or no face cards, your hand sucks & you can whine about it till kingdom come? No wonder you guys are a series down.
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