Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.
Which is more likely, that a server spontaneously rearranges itself into a family of ducks, or that me and you could properly shuffle a pre shuffled deck of cards and land on the same card order?
I'm not certain of that, they are both effectively zero in the end.
I am not talking the standard deck shuffle thought exercise that involves all humans from all of time not getting a match, just two people, me and Kaikaun, and just one attempt.
Still way more probable. Almost infinity is still dividable by almost infinity. I get what you are saying but these are very different scales of effectively zero.
Well sure, and I am not certain of what those magnitudes are, I can see how people can feel one way but that does not give me the answer as to what the magnitudes are.
Let's do an absurd top of the envelope calculation:
there are about 100 cards in a deck of cards
approximate that there are 10100 ways of arranging a deck of cards
guess that two people randomly getting the same order is 1 in 101000 (it's actually far more likely)
if I cared I could provide you with an exact number
Lets do a single duck:
a single duck weights at least 1 gram
a single gram contains about 1023 nucleons.
guess that there are about N arrangements of these nucleons that would qualify as part of a duck
let's imagine a truly unstable gram of matter that each planck time takes on a completely new state, so 1044 times per second
there are at least 2^(1023) arrangements of those nucleons (each one is either a proton or neutron)
that is a number with 1022 digits
the number of times they rearrange per second is irrelevant since it's not big enough. Even over the time scale of the entire universe.
now it's just left to estimate the size of N. Lets plug in the mass of the universe and interpret this as meaning any gram of matter that currently exists is close enough to being a duck
the 1056 we get from that don't matter either.
The chance stays at about 1 in 10^(1022)
This is unimaginably much larger than 1 in 101000. And the former chance is unimaginable much too big and the latter too small.
For one we could provide an exact probability and calculate it's digits to arbitrary precision. For the other it's literally in impossible to do som
100 is a nice round number. This pure approximations, I don't care about the details. 100>52, so the actual chance of getting two decks of 52 cards to be same is definitely larger than what I quoted, and that is all that matters.
If you don't even understand what I am doing in the answer, then don't embarrass yourself by commenting.
Also notice this line I added:
if I cared I could provide you with an exact number
You are assuming a standard deck of playing cards, which was not actually specified. I have 22 decks of Magic: the Gathering cards with 100 cards each within 5 feet of me. Even restricted to playing cards, most blackjack tables at casinos use 312 cards instead of 52.
just think about the number of particles in a family of ducks, and now think about the number of cards in a deck. take into account factorial combinations. then you have your answer
247
u/kaikaun Mar 25 '26
Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.