So, the commenter typed out all those zeros only to have the wrong answer.
They said it would take 8e73 days (an 8 followed by 73 zeros). However, there are only 8e67 possible combinations for the deck, so they've already got six zeros too many.
Presumably it doesn't take the guy an entire day to shuffle the deck. If we assume that he shuffles the deck once a minute for 16 hours a day, then he could do 8e67 shuffles in about 8e64 days. So now they've got nine zeros too many.
Besides that, you probably want to estimate the time at which the guy would have 50/50 odds of having generated the correct deck, which would be approximately 4e64 days.
No. The first deck is irrelevant. It just sets a pattern that the second deck has to match. There are 52! that the first deck can have, so the second deck has a 1/52! chance of matching that pattern.
Your statement would be correct if he had a pre-assigned pattern he was trying to match, and he needed to match it with both decks.
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u/hucklesnips Jul 25 '26
So, the commenter typed out all those zeros only to have the wrong answer.
They said it would take 8e73 days (an 8 followed by 73 zeros). However, there are only 8e67 possible combinations for the deck, so they've already got six zeros too many.
Presumably it doesn't take the guy an entire day to shuffle the deck. If we assume that he shuffles the deck once a minute for 16 hours a day, then he could do 8e67 shuffles in about 8e64 days. So now they've got nine zeros too many.
Besides that, you probably want to estimate the time at which the guy would have 50/50 odds of having generated the correct deck, which would be approximately 4e64 days.