5 ms·
> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number. > Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all. Sounds dangerous to decide
by petters 6y ago
> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number.
> Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all.
Sounds dangerous to decide the winning number in advance. Makes it easier for a vendor or someone else to cheat.
But I suppose they wanted short numbers.
- mc32 6y agoWorse yet, they told them, “don’t print this number”! However thd vendor misunderstood and mistakenly printed them as the low value payout number, so 800,000 of them... It’s almost like when in a high stress situation you tell someone “don’t press the red button” or on a tight rope “hey don’t look down and lose your balance”
- asutekku 6y agoHow else would you define there to be only two winning numbers then? If you define the winning number afterwards, there’s no way telling how many numbers of those would’ve been in circulation.
- loeg 6y agoMake the winner number outside the normal printed range.
- r00fus 6y agoThis is so obvious - what are the downsides? I mean, it could be easily guessable that the bottlecap is valuable, ruining the surprise. Ultimately they didn't test. Or confirm the vendor's test. It's all Pepsi's fault for a mission critical bug.
- virusduck 6y agoI mean...that's what they tried to do...
- mhb 6y agoMake it a non-number?
- vngzs 6y agoUse a CSPRNG to produce the tokens and keep a list of the outputs. Select uniformly/randomly from this list for payouts.
- dane-pgp 6y agoPerhaps they should have instructed the manufacturers to not include numbers which were multiples of, say, 15, but to use all other numbers uniformly. Random audits (with expensive penalties) could have detected whether the manufacturers had complied with this, without making it too obvious to contestants that the winning number would be a multiple of 15. The winning bottles could then be manufactured to contain some specific multiple of 15, while still allowing the organisers some freedom to choose which one.
- xigency 6y agoShould have made the winning number outside the range of printed numbers instead of being 'skipped'.
- skybrian 6y agoIt's not a lottery where people pick their own numbers. As long as you can't find out what it is without opening the bottle, it didn't have to be a number at all; it could just say "you have won" where all the other bottle caps say nothing. Though, making it non-forgeable might be trickier.
- xsmasher 6y ago"You have won" caps would disappear mysterious from the factory floor. You need a system where no one can identify a winner until after the caps have been printed, and the soda has been bottled and shipped.
- thr0w__4w4y 6y agoyeah exactly; if I'm with a vendor factory and hear, "Whatever you do, don't print any 349s!" you can damn well bet I've convinced myself what the winning number is.