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Comment by tmtvl | Hacker News Reader

So if I want a collection of card decks in every possible combination I should start collecting now, got it.

With this, you could invent a very unique magic trick where your spectator well-shuffles a deck of cards, then you can secretly swap your deck with one of the decks from your collection to reveal that yours was shuffled in the exact same way.

This is a relatively well known technique in card manipulations known as a "cold deck". There are many variations of it involving probabilistic but not entirely deterministic forces that lead to a branching path to a different cold deck.

mass of Earth is 6×10^27 kg

mass of the Milky Way is 6x10^42 kg

mass of the visible Universe is 1.5×10^53 kg

Quality deck of cards weighs 0.3 kg. All deck combinations would weigh 2.4×10^67 kg.

= 10^14 times the mass of the visible Universe.

You need many multiverses to store all those cards.

Or just make each deck 10^14 times smaller

Reminds of "Could you fold a sheet of paper on itself 64 times?". "No problem! It's easy". Until you try or think about powers of 2 and calculate the height of the thickness of the sheet multiplied by 2^64. 64 might by replaced by 32 to make it seem more approcheable. That's funny how counter-intuitive it might be.

32 is far too many as the World Record is currently 12 times: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/494571-mo...

I remember as a kid being told that it was impossible to fold a piece of paper in half 8 times and most of the time, that's true unless you use a very long and thin bit of paper.

That would be a serious magic trick, as that's the explanation given to the rubes.

Some sort of auto-shuffling machine with some computer vision to match the shuffling in real time... still a magic trick, a different kind of impressive. But that guy who makes robots at home and does videos would love a project like this. I seriously doubt it would work.

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