Again, not trying to sound too much like a homer re:LaGuardia's order of magnitude error, but consider this:
In today's Washington Post, Outlook section, page B5, under the Banner "Unconventional Wisdom", the "Improbable Probabilities"article, by-line Richard Morin, he makes a little larger error.
How many possible shuffles exist in a 52 card deck? The answer is around 8 times 10 to the 67th power(52 factorial). He calls that on the order of 10 to the 68th power, which is close enough. He then tries to come up with an example so the reader can try and conceptualize how big 10 to the 68th power is.
As an example, he assumes 100 million dealers shuffling a million times a year for 1000 years, as a way to put this 10 to the 68th number in perspective, right? He comes up with 10 to the 17th shuffles. Which is also right.
So, so far, this guy is right on the money. He then proceeds to say that the above example(10 to the 17th power number of shuffles) "would exhaust no more than a quarter of the possibilities", i.e., the total number of combinations is 4 times bigger than the example he gave.
His error is an order of magnitude of 50, the total number being 10 to the 51st times as big as the example rather than FOUR times as big as he wrote. This is a tad bigger than LaGuardia's error....and this guy writes for the Washington Post!
TG |
