Every shuffle is unique
Shuffle a deck of 52 cards and the arrangement you hold has almost certainly never existed before in the history of the universe — and never will again. Here's why.
Shuffling 1,000× per millisecond since
The Dawn of the Dinosaurs — 252 million years ago
Shuffles completed
0
1,000,000 shuffles/sec · running 252,000,000 years
Progress toward all arrangements52!
A million shuffles per second for a quarter billion years — and the progress bar is empty. Not almost empty. Empty.
scroll

The number

52 factorial: 52 × 51 × 50 × … × 1. The result has 68 digits.

52! — every digit
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
68 digits

The counter above has reached roughly 22 digits. To bridge the remaining 46 orders of magnitude you'd need to run the same experiment ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion more times.

The ladder

Each rung isn't a bit more. Each jump is billions to trillions of times larger.

10⁹
Seconds in a human life
~2.5 billion
10¹⁷
Seconds since the Big Bang
13.8 billion years. 50 orders short.
10¹⁹
Grains of sand on Earth
Every beach, desert, seabed.
10²²
Our dinosaur shuffler
Where the hero counter sits right now.
10²⁴
Stars in the observable universe
Trillion galaxies × trillion stars.
10⁵⁰
Atoms on Earth
Still 17 orders too small.
10⁶⁷
52!
The number we need.
10⁸⁰
Atoms in the observable universe
Only 13 orders above 52!
♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

The thought experiment

A timer counts down from 52! seconds. Scroll through the steps and watch the seconds accumulate — with a visual at each stage showing how far we've come against the impossible total.

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

Shuffle it yourself

This arrangement has almost certainly never existed before — and never will again.

Shuffles: 0