I’m sure they need no introduction… unless you were raised on a deserted island. I was looking at a few rolls (those in the photo… Halloween leftovers) and noticed something interesting. The candies come in six colors—yellow, white, green, red, orange, and purple—and are randomly packaged fifteen pieces to a roll. This means when you look at the sequence of colors in each roll, you are looking at a fingerprint of sorts because each roll is different.
But how different? How many unique Smarties fingerprints are possible?
I’ve calculated that, and there are over 470 billion possible fingerprints. This means the chance of finding two identical rolls is about 1 in 470,000,000,000.
Let’s add some perspective…
You could give everyone on earth their own unique roll of Smarties… 60 times over.
You are more likely to win Powerball 1,600 times than you are to find two identical rolls of Smarties.
There are two unique rolls for each star in the Milky Way galaxy.
The actual number of possible unique Smarties rolls is 470,184,984,576.
If you had a complete set of unique rolls and laid them end-to-end, they would span over eighteen million miles. That’s to the moon—and back—thirty-six times. And if you consumed a single piece of candy every second, eating them all would take you more than a quarter million years.
Do you feel Smartie-er now?
I do. And such is life.
