Stuff that 'boggles' your mind.

Jay794 said:
If Bill Gates gave half his money to charity, he could solve world hunger (not sure how true that is, just heard it somewhere)

But if it is true, then why doesn't he? or someone else now that he's not the richest man in the world anymore?

How much more famous that "I solved world hunger" could you get, with the possible exception of "I cured cancer"
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World hunger isn't caused by a lack of money, it's a lack of resources. There's only so much food to go around at any given time.

When our economies compete with each other we're really just seeing which countries get to take more of the world's resources than others. It's a simple matter of over population I'm afraid.
 
Ahleckz said:
Maths:
There are 8x10(to the power of 67) per*mu*ta*tions of a deck of 52 cards. The mod*ern deck of cards as we know it was invented in 1480. There are approx*i*mately 1.6x10(10) sec*onds between now and then. In order for there to even be a 0.001% chance of a ran*dom shuf*fle to have been seen before, the world would have needed to have gen*er*ated 8x10(62) shuf*fles to date or appropriately 5x10(52) shuf*fles per sec*ond.

Copied and pasted from elsewhere, so I await to be proved wrong!
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I don't think that is correct.

Think the pigeonhole principle you see in the Birthday Paradox would make the chances much higher than you think. I think the explanation you've given is how many times you would have to shuffle two decks of cards to have a 0.001% chance of them both being the same in that instance.

But what we want is the chances of any shuffled deck matching any other shuffled deck throughout history. Now after the first ever shuffle was done, the second had a 8x10(to the power of 67) to 1 chance of matching it. But the third ever shuffle in history now has two sets of previous shuffle orders it can match with, so the chance of that one matching is double the second shuffles's chances ( 4x10(to the power of 67) to 1), the fourth shuffle has three previous orders to try and match, so has three times the chance of finding a match than the second shuffle and so on.

So with every new shuffle, the chances of not matching a previous shuffle are reduced. Then you combine that with the number of attempts and the probability of any two, ever matching goes up quite quickly.
 
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estebanrey said:
I don't think that is correct.

Think the pigeonhole principle you see in the Birthday Paradox would make the chances much higher than you think. I think the explanation you've given is how many times you would have to shuffle two decks of cards to have a 0.001% chance of them both being the same in that instance.

But what we want is the chances of any shuffled deck matching any other shuffled deck throughout history. Now after the first ever shuffle was done, the second had a 8x10(to the power of 67) to 1 chance of matching it. But the third ever shuffle in history now has two sets of previous shuffle orders it can match with, so the chance of the matching doubles the second shuffles's chances ( 4x10(to the power of 67) to 1), the fourth shuffle has three previous orders to try and match with and so on.

So with every new shuffle, the chances of matching a previous shuffle are reduced. Then you combine that with the number of attempts and the probability of any two, ever matching goes up quite quickly.
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I'm no mathematician (far from it), I was just adding a bit of maths into the equation (GED'DIT?!). However, thinking about what you've just said that does make quite a lot of sense. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me in this field could comment?
 
Jay794 said:
If Bill Gates gave half his money to charity, he could solve world hunger (not sure how true that is, just heard it somewhere)

But if it is true, then why doesn't he? or someone else now that he's not the richest man in the world anymore?

How much more famous that "I solved world hunger" could you get, with the possible exception of "I cured cancer"
Click to expand...

He is giving away 95% of his fortune over the coarse of the next 20 years, after he retire he created a whole new company solely for the purpose of arranging on how best to give it away so that the receivers gets most benefit out of his dollars.

And by then you'll see the problem of world hunger is something that can never be solved. If all of the top 20 richest people in the world gave away every single penny they had, it would not make a dent in the problem at all. Sad but true

EDIT - Damn, beaten to it
 
that all those little 1's and 0's means that I can sit here and watch videos on VLC and chat to people from all over the world.
 
I understand how computers work..from start to finish, from the 1s and 0s to VLC.

I suspect that I'm part of the last generation of people who will. Everybody younger than me has so much technology around them that they can't hope to understand how it works. I'm old enough that microwaves, CDs, the internet, PCs etc all hit mass market in my memory.
 
Ahleckz said:
I'm no mathematician (far from it), I was just adding a bit of maths into the equation (GED'DIT?!). However, thinking about what you've just said that does make quite a lot of sense. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me in this field could comment?
Click to expand...

I've got the Birthday Paradox formula in Excel but I tried doing combinations of cards in it and the numbers being dealt with are so high is won't compute it :(.
 
What's a shuffle? Do you mean that the shuffle has to proceed in the same order, or do you just mean the same order of the 52 cards once it's complete?

Edit : I just worked out the combinations possible and 52! is 8 x10 to the 67, so it must be that.
 
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Actually, as i remember Voyager 1 has already left the heliosphere... then entered it again. That's how we know it fluctuates, which is why the data we get from it now is some of the most interesting it's given us.
 
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