Canfield solitaire with fifty-two cards will play out successfully? “After spending a lot of time trying to estimate them by pure combinatorial calculations,” he recalls, “I wondered whether a more practical method than ‘abstract thinking’ might not be to lay it out say one hundred times and simply observe and count the number of successful plays.” This, he noted, was a far easier way to arrive at an approximate answer than “to try to compute all the combinatorial possibilities which are an exponentially increasing number so great that, except in very elementary cases, there is no way to
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