Play Your Cards Right

Fact: If you shuffle a deck of cards, that precise order of cards has probably never happened before.

Actually, if every single person on earth (all 7 billion of us) had shuffled one deck of cards every second since the start of the universe – 13.7 billion years ago – we still wouldn’t even be close to having seen every possible order of cards.

The huge number of potential orders is the result of the 52 cards in a deck. The number of possible combinations can be calculated using a function called a ‘factorial’ [written as ‘!’]. This multiplies that number by every number smaller than itself.

For example: 10! = 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

Now imagine that for 52 factorial, and it’s not hard to see that very quickly it becomes a massively large number:

80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to be precise (that’s 67 zeros). And in the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing; if you really want your mind blown, get someone to explain Graham’s Number (the largest number ever even thought of) to you.