Launching today
The Impossible Shuffle
The greatest group project humanity will never finish
2 followers
The greatest group project humanity will never finish
2 followers
Somebody shuffled this deck once. Now the whole internet has to do it again. The odds: 1 in 52!, about 8 × 10^67. Every shuffle is provably fair. If anyone ever does it, the mission ends forever. Mathematics says no. We say: hold my cards.
The Legend of the First Shuffle
It started the way most bad ideas start: a deck of cards and a free evening.
I shuffled. Well, technically I made a computer shuffle, with proper cryptographic randomness, because if you’re going to ruin an evening, you ruin it properly. Then I looked at the deck and asked the question that has wrecked every evening since: could anyone ever shuffle this exact order again?
Cards feel harmless. Everybody owns a deck. Your grandmother beats you at them. Magicians do tricks with them at weddings. So your gut says: sure, shuffle long enough and it comes back around.
Your gut is off by 67 zeros. A deck has 52! possible orders: about 8 × 10⁶⁷. That’s more than the number of atoms on Earth. If every person alive had shuffled once a second since the Big Bang, humanity would have tried 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000004% of them.
Which means every proper shuffle you have ever done was almost certainly a world first. Nobody told you. Nobody gave you a trophy. Nobody even clapped.
A reasonable man would have put the deck down. I wrote the order down instead. That deck became the Holy Grail Sequence: fixed forever, and published for the whole world to check. Then I worked out how long it would take to shuffle it again by hand, at 20 seconds a go: roughly 51 novemdecillion years. Give or take a Tuesday.
So I did the only sensible thing. I made it everybody’s problem. I founded Mission Control, Department of Lost Causes. I opened the doors to the whole internet. And I hired Professor Factorial: a mathematician in a top hat whose only job is to be right. He has been right 2.6 trillion times in a row. He sips his tea and says: “Splendid. Again?” He is unbearable about it.
The mission has one rule. The moment anyone shuffles the Grail again, all 52 cards in order, it ends. Forever. No prize. No reset. No Season 2. Just their name on the Grail, for as long as there are decks.
I shuffled this deck once. Now humanity has to do it again.
Mathematics says no. We say: hold my cards.
Happy shuffling,
Alexander