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.

PJ.

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"You call, gonna be all over baby!" - Scotty Nguyen