Stunning Fact About Playing Cards ?
It Starts with a Simple Deck of Playing Cards They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless. The richness of most playing card games owes itself to this fact. Permute this! The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is 52!. I think the exclamation mark was chosen as the symbol for the factorial operator to highlight the fact that this function produces surprisingly large numbers in a very short time. If you have an old school pocket calculator, the kind that maxes out at 99,999,999, an attempt to calculate the factorial of any number greater than 11 results only in the none too helpful value of "Error". So if 12! will break a typical calculator, how large is 52!? 52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a sin