Good ol' Probability

Number Theory Level pending

If you've ever heard of probability, which you probably have, then this question should be fun.

If you have a deck of cards and you shuffle them, as much as you want, then what will be the probability that the first card on top will be the king and then the queen to be next and then the jack and then ten and so forth.

What is the probability for the deck to be in this order?

50! 52! 54! 49!

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2 solutions

Michael Mendrin
Sep 25, 2018

For the probability to be 1 in 52!, you need to specify that the first 13 cards are all of one particular suit, then the next 13 cards of all of anothe particular suit, etc., so that there is only ONE array of cards that "meets the criteria". Otherwise, the probability is going to be a lot less than 1 in 52! . For instance, suits don't matter at all, even in any block of 13 cards, then the probability is 1 in 52! divided by 4!^13.

Nahyan Aijaz
Sep 24, 2018

If you look at a deck then there are 52 cards in total, so let's take this one step at a time. Now, as the problem asks, what are the chances that the king would be first. Since it isn't specified which king should be first, then we can just assume that a king would take that place and every other card would go in order 4x all the way to one. If that is the case then, the first card should have the probability of 1 52 \frac{1}{52} and seeing that this position is taken then the next position would be multiplied by the previous as 1 51 \frac{1}{51} and so on like so, if you remove the 1's for simplicity.

52 x 51 x 50 x 49...... x 1

Which would give you the mind-bogglingly, I know that isn't a word , large number of 52! or 52 factorial. This number can be shown as 8.06x10^67. This number is so large that you would need a whole video to explain it, which is why you should watch this. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DSclqnnC2s)

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