WONDERS OF A PACK OF CARDS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 1 May 1937, Page 16

WONDERS OF A PACK OF CARDS

The variety of ways in which a given number of articles may be placed is a source of wonder to a host of people. An expert mathemetician once set himself the nice little sum of calculating the number of different ways in which 52 cards of a pack can be distributed among four players. 13 to each, taking every possible combination and permutation. It would be useless to present the answer in a long row of figures, for no one can realise what such a numerical array really conveys; nor would it be much better to play with the words billions and trillions, seeing that they are mere words, and nothing more, to most of us; but the following illustration is easily grasped (says a contemporary). If the entire population of the earth, taken at 1,000,000,000 persons, were to deal cards incessantly, day and night, for 100,000,000 years, at the rate of a deal by each person a minute, they would not have exhausted the one hundredth thousandth part of the number of essentially different ways in which the cards can be so distributed.