M2M Day 10: I’m starting to see patterns (& some mindblowing math about cards)
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For November, my goal is to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than 2 minutes.
Things are starting to repeat…
It’s been 1.5 weeks since I started practicing memorizing cards, and for the first time today, I’m starting to see and leverage patterns. In particular, during my memorization attempts, there are 3-card groups that I realize I’ve seen before, and so, I can much more quickly encode these cards.
Most of these patterns, though, are in the action-object pairs, which I’m starting to recognize and reuse more fluently (applying an action-object pair to a new person is fairly easy and fast; creating a brand new action-object pair takes a lot more mental processing).
Although, I only see a few of these repeated groups during a particular memorization attempt, I still feel like I’ve had a breakthrough today. Even if this breakthrough isn’t necessarily affecting my times significantly now, I realize that, if I continue practicing in this way, I will become way more fluent, which hopefully means compounding gains in my speed.
And yet, things will probably never repeat…
Even though, at the microlevel, I’m starting to notice repeating clusters of cards, I know that I will likely never memorize the same deck twice.
In fact, there are 52! (i.e. 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 … x 3 x 2 x 1) different ways that a deck of cards can be arranged. 52! is on the order of magnitude of 10⁶⁷.
10⁶⁷ is hard to understand, so let me make it a bit more tangible: Imagine there are 100 trillion people, who each have 100 trillion decks of cards. Ever second, all 100 trillion people shuffle each of their 100 trillion decks of cards 100 trillion times. Now, imagine they do this every second, starting from the beginning of the universe and continuing until right now in 2016. Then, repeat this entire process 200,000 more times.
That’s how long it would take for all those people to complete 10⁶⁷ shuffles.
So, basically, every time you use a deck of cards, it’s almost certainly the first (and likely last) time any deck has been in that order since the history of forever.
Anyway, the point is that, although I’m seeing patterns, they will always be very tiny patterns. And, every time I memorize a deck of cards, it’s probably the first and last time anyone will memorize that exact order.
Pretty cool to think about.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
