I imagine somebody has done research on this: for a given card game, how many functionally distinct shuffles there are.
I imagine somebody has done research on this: for a given card game, how many functionally distinct shuffles there are.
However if you combine the outputs of two, but don't step them at the same time, you can have more outputs.
Imagine you had one that outputs just 0 and 1 and then loops. You could have two of these updating at a different frequency and have four distinct outputs.
I think that makes sense.
Something you may find interesting is formal methods - what we're talking about here are "equivalence classes". In formal methods you want to analyze the totality of a system and understand every outcome based on every possible state within the rules of the system. Clearly this is a combinatoric nightmare in anything interesting (even a simple system like a card game and 52 cards, as we can see). Equivalence classes are a way of knowing distinct, but not actually different, states, and grouping them together so that they can all be considered just once.