thelinell.com
Shuffle a deck.
It has never existed before.
There are 52! ways to order a deck of cards. That's 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. Shuffle well, and the deck in your hands is almost certainly the first of its kind.
This is deck number
How big is 52!?
- If all 8 billion people on Earth shuffled a deck every second since the Big Bang, they'd have made fewer than one in 1040 of all possible decks.
- You'd need around 1034 shuffles before there's even a coin-flip chance that any two of them ever matched.
- Writing down one deck takes about 226 bits of information. Some common random number generators, like JavaScript's
Math.randomand Java'sRandom, hold less than that, so they can never produce most decks. This site shuffles with the operating system's secure randomness instead.
But is your shuffle actually random?
Each strip below is one deck, with every card colored by where it started. A fresh deck is a smooth rainbow. Shuffle it and watch the rainbow break apart.
| Riffles |
|---|
| Distance |
After 7 riffle shuffles, a deck is close enough to random for any card game. Fewer than 5 and it's barely mixed at all. The gentle overhand shuffle most people use is far worse: it takes around 2,500 of them to do the same job.