How unique is a random shuffle?

The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards (fairly) in the same way twice in the history of the world, or ever will again, are infinitesimally small.

The number of possible ways to order a pack of 52 cards is ’52!’ (“52 factorial”) which means multiplying 52 by 51 by 50… all the way down to 1. The number you get at the end is 8×10^67 (8 with 67 ‘0’s after it), essentially meaning that a randomly shuffled deck has never been seen before and will never be seen again.

So next time you shuffle a deck, you should feel pretty special for holding something so unique! Try for yourself – if you make friends with every person on earth and each person shuffles one deck of cards each second, for the age of the Universe, there will be a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion chance of two decks matching.

Ace of spaces card

Want to find out more about our anti-counterfeiting solutions?

Q-ID demonstration screenshot

Quantum Base has patented, designed and developed the world’s first Quantum Secure Q-ID® QR Codes.

Harnessing inherent randomness from our scientific research in quantum mechanics, each Q-ID® QR code is unbreakable due to its 100% unique identity or ‘quantum fingerprint’ which is read by a standard smartphone and verified by the patented Quantum Base App.