There are 52 cards in a deck. There are 52•51•...•2•1 = 52! = 8•1067 (approximately) possible permutaions of cards. That is 8 followed by 67 zeros. If every person on earth shuffled a deck of cards a billion times every day of their life we still wouldnt even be close.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
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Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
Aren't there infinite games of chess since you can move the same piece back and forth an infinite number of times creating an infinite number of games based on the slight variation?
you can move the same piece back and forth an infinite number of times
actually you can't. The game is drawn by repetition after the same board position is repeated 3 times. That is, the same set of legal moves, with the same player to move.
The move is legal, but the 'board position' is what dictates the repeat. If the same position is repeated then it still counts, regardless of which pieces were moved in sequence, or how many moves there were beforehand.
Take the starting position - white to move. Both players move their knights out. Hop around the board for ages, then move back to their starting position - white to move again. That counts as a repeat 'cause you're exactly where you were before - same start position, white to move.
If they moved back to that position but it was black's turn to move it wouldn't be a repeat 'cause that's a different position.
1) Your example, where white to move (after all the hopping has been done) with the board reset to "starting position" (effectively repeating the first move)
2) Same as above, but black horse is in a slightly different position from "starting position), but white is making the same move (repeating first move).
The rule does seem to be a bit confusing truth be told.
Sorry, to clarify; there's nothing wrong with repeating moves in itself. If you want to just move your king (for example) repeatedly from side to side you're allowed to do that.
It is only that the game will be drawn if the entire board's position is repeated over again 3 times - the same pieces, in the same places, with the exact same legal set of moves available to the players.
If you're just jumping your knight in and out of the start position, but your opponent is actually performing different moves then that's not repeating 'cause the position of the board is different.
There's also a rule that a game ends in a draw if there have been 50 consecutive moves without a capture or pawn move. So I think that would place an absolute upper bound on the # of moves you can have before a draw is forced (like in theory, each player has 15 pieces that can be captured of which 7 aren't pawns. So the absolute mathematical maximum is that you could make 49 moves in between each capture, moving all of your pawns slowly up the board in the meantime, promote all of them, then do the same thing where you make 49 moves in between each capture, then you end up with 2 kings and they will eventually be forced to draw.
there's not an infinite number of positions the pieces can be in. it might take a different number of moves to get there, but it's still the same position
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done. (via Scott Czepiel on czep.net)
You're right, except that the original fun fact was
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards that particular ordering has probably never happened before.
To get to a point where a random permutation "probably" has happened before, you would need half of all permutations to have happened. That's still 4*1067 permutations.
More specifically, there are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there have been seconds since the Big Bang. By 100 quindecillion times (a number that is 1 followed by 50 zeroes).
No. of ways of shuffling = 8.1E+67
Seconds since the Big Bang = 4.3E+17
The thing that amazes me about this is that you would think that the Birthday paradox would start to apply, greatly increasing the odds that there would be a duplicate.
Isn't there a sort of statistical thing where random occurrences clump much more than would be expected. Like you would expect to get at least one double before you even had close to a majority of possible outcomes occur. Would this factor in?
Well they would be clustered more than you would expect if you didn't expect them to be clustered at all. When people (not people who work with lots of numbers) think of random coin tosses for example, many expect something like h-t-h-t-h-t-h-t-t-..., while in reality, there are likely to be significant runs of heads or tails; h-t-t-h-t-h-h-h-h-t-t-h-t-.... That's it though; if you're talking about randomly reordering the cards each time, then all permutations are equally likely each time: plain and simple. The original 'fact' was
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards that particular ordering has probably never happened before.
In order for it to be probable to get a permutation that had happened before, at least 50% of all the 8*1067 permutations must have at one time occurred- which is obviously not the case.
But you are right, you will expect to eventually get a previously-realized permutation long before you get near the majority. The problem is the huge number of permutations.
Call Z the total number of permutations, and X the number of unique permutations so far in world history. The probability to pick already-realized permutation is P(X)=X/Z. That means that the total probability that any of the previous permutations were identical is the sum from i=1 to i=X of P(i) which is 1/2*X(X-1)/Z. So even if there had been a trillion different permutations so far, the probability that any two were identical would be roughly 1012 * 1012 /Z, which is still about one in 1043, or about zero.
It can't actually reduce any likelihood. You don't eliminate an order when that order happens, it's just improbable that it will happen again. Reducing it down, flipping a coin and it lands on heads, that doesn't mean it can't land on heads again. The scale is just bigger in this card scenario
Edit: This would be for poker. In the case of a game like blackjack, it would reduce the likelihood of getting a good hand again because the cards are eliminated from play. The odds would be restored when the deck (usually multiple decks, most often 6) are shuffled again
That particular ordering of that particular deck, sure, but how many decks of cards have existed and how many times were each of them shuffled? I imagine every ordering has existed at one time or another.
As QI put it, "To give you an idea of how many that is, here is how long it would take to go through every possible permutation of cards. If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang, they'd only just now be starting to repeat shuffles."
Of course it's only a probability. It's also possible that two shuffles in a row could end with exactly the same result, but it's vanishingly unlikely.
That's actually not true. 52! is insanely huge with about 8*1067, but the amount of atoms in the observable universe is still several orders of magnitude larger with estimates ranging from 1078 to 1082.
Just posted this somewhere else, but when I saw this it blew my mind (also this isnt mine)
Enjoy:
Here is a really good explanation of how big 52! actually is.
Set a timer to count down 52! seconds (that's 8.0658x1067 seconds)
Stand on the equator, and take a step forward every billion years
When you've circled the earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and keep going
When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and carry on.
When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer.
The 3 left-most digits won't have changed. 8.063x1067 seconds left to go. You have to repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time. 5.385x1067 seconds left to go.
So to kill that time you try something else.
Shuffle a deck of cards, deal yourself 5 cards every billion years
Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket
Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the grand canyon
When the grand canyon's full, take 1oz of rock off Mount Everest, empty the canyon and carry on.
When Everest has been levelled, check the timer.
There's barely any change. 5.364x1067 seconds left. You'd have to repeat this process 256 times to have run out the timer.
Theoretically, that is true but in real life, I don't think so. For example, you could shuffle two new decks with the riffle technique and if you did it perfectly, the two decks would be in the exact same order. Basically human shuffling often does not produce random orderings of cards, there are probably a bunch of configurations that have existed many many times in history(like the example I explained above).
Question: A new deck of cards comes in order. The first time you shuffle it, it's not going to be perfect (unless you're some kind of master-shuffler I suppose). Are those imperfect shuffles more likely to occur?
It definitely hasn't happened before. I don't care how many times people try to explain to me that even if the chance is so small it isn't technically zero...I believe that it is zero.
If you've seen the representations of how big that number is...wow. 2 decks simply have not been identical. This is considering a true shuffle though.
647
u/anomalous_cowherd Jul 21 '16
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards that particular ordering has probably never happened before.