• TheTechnician27
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    For comparison, if you had a deck of 52 playing cards and shuffled them into a random order, then checked a year later to see if they were in the same order as when you opened the box, reshuffled if they weren’t, and repeated another year later, and so on…

    We can use the cumulative distribution function of the geometric distribution 1 - (1 - p)k, where p is the per-trial probability and k is the number of trials, to find the chance that you’ll find at least one correctly sorted deck from now until the time in this paper. There’s a… Well, SageMath failed because of the exponent, but Wolfram Alpha tells me, uhhhhh…

    Wolfram Alpha screenshot showing the CDF equation with parameters plugged in

    Yeaaaaaaaaah, we’re not going anywhere any time soon.