الأحد، 27 نوفمبر 2011

Four "perfect hands"

From a story in The Sun, via Arbroath:
A group of whist players were each dealt a complete suit in an opening hand — beating odds of two thousand quadrillion to one. Wenda Douthwaite, 77, and her three friends were "gobsmacked" when they were dealt the hand during a game last week. Mathematician Dr Alexander Mijatovic, a probability expert at Warwick University, worked out the odds as being 2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,559,999 to 1...

Everything was done as usual. The pack of cards was an old one. The cards were shuffled, cut and dealt as normal... "We play regularly and are always very careful to make sure the deck of cards is shuffled repeatedly.
I don't mean to sound churlish here, because they surely deserve their moment of fun and fame, but mathematically every other set of hands they were dealt that night would have had the same probability of occurring.  This arrangement of cards is visually striking, but not mathematically any less likely than any other specific distribution.

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