Here is where I beg to differ.
You can start with any old note. 1/1, no big deal.
Your second note though, must be the exact match, so out of a run of 10 million less a few, your odds become 1/10M (est.)
I don't understand the 3000 randomly selected notes bit- could you elaborate?
Out of a sample of 3000 notes, you have 3000 choices for the first note in your pair and then 2999 remaining choices for your second note.
But, there are two different ways to assemble each pair, that is, you could have chosen one of the notes first, or the other. So the total number of pairs possible is 3000*2999/2 = 4,498,500.
Now, the likelyhood that any given pair is NOT a match is 0.9999999 (9,999,999/ 10,000,000).
The likelyhood that NONE of your 4,498,500 pairs are a match would then be 0.9999999^4,498,500 = 0.6377
So the likelyhood of finding a matched pair is 1-0.6377 = 36.33%
So are you saying if I had 10,000 notes I have a 99% chance of finding a match? :-? :-? :-?
Correct. Same calculations with 10,000 notes gives you 49,995,000 pairs.
0.9999999^49,995,000 = 0.00674
or 99.326% chance of finding at least one match.
Chances are you'd find several (~5) matched pairs with this many notes to choose from.
You could even further increase your odds by restricting your sample to meet some arbitrary but easily met criteria, such as only notes with a serial number ending in "1". But the key is having a large sample to choose from since your chances of finding a match increase with the SQUARE of the sample size.
You also have to keep in mind that if you're choosing notes from a small set of prefixes, the difficulty increases slightly since, of course, any pair from the same prefix has a ZERO likelyhood of being a match (unless you're talking about AL_ $1 & $20...).
Ok, enough with that. I should be doing my math homework right now.