Math....edit (DBO)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, December 29, 2016, 16:46 (2668 days ago) @ dogcow

I'm out of cards.

When you win, just post your card in a new thread with the title BINGO! You have a whole year! First three get a prize.

How is that possible? A 5x5 grid has 25 possible permutations, and you've only posted 16. I didn't have much interest in playing, but math that doesn't add up makes me curious. ;)
Edit:

If you remove the 5 vertically similar options, and one horizontally-symmetric (these cards would all have the same row possiblities), that drops to 19 cards. Are there three other similar arrangements I'm missing?

These 5x5 cards can be seen as a sequence of 24 squares where ordering matters (the 25th being the center free space), these 24 squares are chosen from a pool of at least 24 things, I think Cody has more than 24 things to chose from though. At a minimum, that's WAY more than 25 possible cards. (24*23*22*21*20*19*18*17*16*15*14*13*12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1 = 6.2x10^23)

For example to make a row you pick 5 things, 1 at a time, from a pool of 24, you could come up with over 5 million unique rows. Heck there's 24 different ways to chose the first tile and 552 = 24 * 23 different ways to chose the first two.

Maybe Cody was using a demo of some software and ran out of demo cards.

Yup :-)