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October 20, 2006

Strange But True!

Q. How would you like to write down something nobody has ever written before and never will. It'll take only five minutes. Interested?

A. With a six-sided die, roll 50 numbers, such as 3466346362 1632143466 3344524342 2653364263 1152454334, and you've just created a sequence that no one has ever created before, says Jeffrey Rosenthal in “Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities.” In fact, if all of the 100 billion people who ever lived spent their entire lives rolling such numbers once per minute, the likelihood of anyone ever hitting your number would be less than one chance in a 1 followed by 20 zeros. If the CIA had a million computers producing a billion sequences a second, it would take 250 trillion years to have even a 1 percent chance of hitting it!


 
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