14 ms·

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)

185 points by vinnyglennon 6y ago

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theguppydream 6y ago
Brilliant story. This reminds me so much of David Foster Wallace's 'Little Expressionless Animals,' I wonder if DFW was aware of the broadcast and took it as inspiration
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Vaslo 6y ago
This is one of those stories I go back to reading about from time to time. I remember being a little boy home from school, either sick or summertime, and saw this episode. Well at least the first part where they had to freeze frame mid show and the show’s host Peter Tomarken walked out to tell everyone how Larson was making Game Show history. I was too young too know much about statistics, patterns, etc. to understand how impossible this could be if the board was truly random. Larson just seemed like an awkward but lucky and smart guy. Hearing this full story some years later shows how much we were in the dark on so many situations before the internet. As hard as you try to bulletproof things, there’s that one person who figures out a way to bypass it.
skrebbel 6y ago
Mad offtopic unimportant nitpick here. I'm so extremely put off when an author spends three paragraphs building up to an exciting climax, hits enter enter and then writes "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949". I had to skim half the article to find out how the story continued. Anecdotally, this strikes me as a uniquely American thing to do (or, at least, I've not read a single Dutch article pulling this trick), is there any point to it? Is it just something about eyeballs and ads? Do they teach this stuff in journalism school? Maybe Americans are immune to it because of the enormous amounts of "build up, build up, build up, almost there..... Let's continue after the messages! ^_^" on childhood TV?
- rriepe 6y ago
  Articles occasionally get made into movies, and therefore have a huge incentive to be movie-like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazine_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazin...
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- runawaybottle 6y ago
  People write drunk bro, or on speed, especially Americans.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  On many mobile sites (amp?) an ad is inserted every screenful of text so the longer the text the more ads. Not sure this is related but go look at english recipe sites. 10-15 screens of fluff to get to the recipe. It's clearly some kind of SEO or ad optimizing formula
  - progre 6y ago
    I was complaining to my wife about this exact thing yesterday. Her reply: You do know we own like 20 printed cookbooks right? No ads in those...
- FatalLogic 6y ago
  Would you prefer the article to begin "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949. Although he was generally regarded as creative and intelligent, he had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful employment. One of his earliest exploits was in middle school ..."? No, you probably would stop reading after two lines of that. Because who cares about this ordinary-sounding guy? We have to know why he's interesting, first. Or would you prefer to not know about Larson's background, and just get the exciting part of the story? Maybe you would, but many people would be left feeling dissatisfied by that and halfway through they would be asking, "So, who is this guy Larson, where did he come from? What's the context behind all this crazy stuff he did?" Organizing a narrative is a difficult logistical challenge. Could you do it better?
OscarCunningham 6y ago
> Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. [...] They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time This doesn't seem possible. Surely someone who thought the way he did would have realised that you could sort the money in advance.
- akdor1154 6y ago
  n = 100_000 K = 2 # seconds time_secs = K * n * log(n) t = timedelta(seconds=time_secs) t # datetime.timedelta(days=26, seconds=56185, microseconds=92994) So around a month (at 24×7, so in reality more like 3 months) of time sorting if in a horrendous abuse of big O notation we assume that sorting the notes takes 2 * n * log(n) seconds. I guess he could use a pigeonhole sort though - at constant factor of 10 seconds this gives 11 days 49600 seconds.
  - mamon 6y ago
    Bigger problem is that there are 11.7 B one dollar bills in circulation [1]. Even having that $100k sorted you still only stand 1: 117000 chance of winning. [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/how-many-dollar-bill-circulated/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/how-...
    - egman_ekki 6y ago
      But there is no downside (besides the time cost of the one-dollar-bill operation). If you don't win, you just put the money back to the bank. What is interesting is that you could theoretically deposit (part of) the money into your account and then withdraw somewhere else, so change the odds slightly.
      - FatalLogic 6y ago
        That searching is quite expensive, considering the odds (only one chance per day). Besides, there was also significant additional downside, which became obvious in this case: The risk of having a pile of cash in your house which could be stolen
ryanmercer 6y ago
Can we bring this game show back, and can I talk to the casting associate? I'd prefer to be a millionaire so I could be independently wealthy and do what I want instead of living just to pay bills, but if I could be a thousandaire, hey that is a nice start! I'm always amazed, despite being well aware of inflation, the cost of things/cash value of prizes in things of yesteryear. When you hear someone bought their house for something like 7,000 dollars or their brand new car for 2,400 dollars my monkey brain just refuses to stop for a second and go "yeah but inflation". Then there is the rabbit hole of goods that have gotten significantly cheaper over time, or even those that have been volatile at times (such as the spot price of silver and gold). Way too easy to get lost thinking about stuff like that.
- jeofken 6y ago
  Get ready for inflation to go absolutely nuts in the wake of last year. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1 People who own (fiat) currency or have their salaries denoted in $ will face tough times - Weimar style.
  - spuz 6y ago
    Could you explain how your link backs up your claim?
    - irjustin 6y ago
      Not the poster, but the M1 denotes how much money gets printed. Because of COVID, for better or worse, US has been printing money like crazy to hand out and prop up different areas of the country. Whether you agree/disagree with this, that's for another thread. Point is, we're printing money. If you're familiar with inflation, stop here. Obviously the country and the world are not producing nor consuming at the same level. Thusly at an extremely extremely simplistic level, we're not creating more "intrinsic" value, but adding more printed money to represent that "intrinsic" value. Each dollar now has less "intrinsic" value. (this is over simplified to the n-th degree). This is the basis for inflation. Any unstable country would have seen hyper inflation given these numbers. So, the parent comment is alluding to this... eventually production has to catch up or inflation will.
Vinnl 6y ago
As someone who also stacked the odds in their favour on a gameshow [1], I can appreciate the effort but am also glad I never got as obsessed as this guy. Although my partner in crime (my brother) did just go on another winning streak on another gameshow [2], so maybe I should start worrying... [1] https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow or Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312 https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312 [2] https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-record-tom-roes-dagwinnaar-7-afleveringen-slimste-mens.html https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-recor...
- mabbo 6y ago
  As a non-Dutch speaker, I have to know- what was the joke?
  - w0utert 6y ago
    For the second word he says 'my ex girlfriend...' and then guesses the dutch equivalent of the word 'cunt', basically.
Lio 6y ago
For some reason I thought this might be related to Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, which has monk like characters who lock themselves away for 1000 years. The article is a great read though, reminds me of a childhood friend who tried to build a light operated solenoid to beat fruit-machines on their stop the trail features. Long story short, it didn't work because the people who build fruit-machines were smart enough to randomise the latency of the button push.
kylewins 6y ago
Rough Calculation: 11.7 billion one dollar bills are in circulation today 100,000 / 11,700,000,000 Every Day 1 in Million Chance of Winning The guy was seemingly clever why not take the 5mins to find the odds or a few hours to ask the local math teacher...
- hh3k0 6y ago
  Yeah, I'd wager it was his laziness and proneness to shortcuts. One thing, though: Article states the radio show took place a few months after he won so probably 1984 or 1985. Federal Reserve website states that there were 7.5 billion one-dollar bills in circulation in 1999 (couldn't find numbers for years prior 1999). Increase of one-dollar bills in circulation seems to have fluctuated a lot over the course of years, might have been a significantly lower number in 1984/1985. I mean, it'd still be an impossibly long shot but I felt like pointing it out.
  - kylewins 6y ago
    I was also thinking if the radio host was reading serial numbers from a specific newish year and the bank notes are more likely to be new then old maybe that would also increase the odds. Yeah, but I'll pass on that. Give me a job at walmart over reading serial numbers all day. Myth of sisphus
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- mywittyname 6y ago
  Depending on how the serial number was chosen, the odds could be dramatically higher, dramatically lower, or zero. If the serial number was derived from another, new bill, received from a local bank, then the odds are quite good. If it is chosen by writing the serial number of a bill in your pocket, then circulating the bill by purchasing something. The odds go up if you happen to stop by the banks a few days after that happened, or they go to zero if the bill was not fit for circulation and it was removed by the Federal Reserve. Also, there's a good chance that a random serial number is not actually valid.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
I believe the title is referencing this classic: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-be-groped-by-an-eleven-thousand-aire/n36926 https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-b...
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  No, both the OP and SNL are referring to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    WWtbaM came first. Then SNL made fun of it. Now the OP is leveraging both with a nod.
    - DamnInteresting 6y ago
      Author of the article here. I see why you drew that conclusion, but in this case, I was not aware of the similarly titled sketch until now. If I had been aware of it, I would have selected a different title for mine, to avoid the appearance of title pilferage. Mine was just a play on the game show title, essentially the same joke independently conceived.
      - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
        Thanks for chiming in to this internet digression from your actual statement. :)
code_duck 6y ago
Another discussion [2015]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 Found this while trying to determine the definition of "unbeardily".
flerchin 6y ago
If he sorted the bills by serial number he could find out if he won the contest by binary search in around 17 cuts. His wife probably still would have stolen his money though.
crazydoggers 6y ago
It’s sad he spent so much of his time and energy on get rich quick schemes. Turns out it’s not quick nor easy... and the ROI when you could do something productive is very poor. I often think if we taught more about entrepreneurship in schools a lot of these get rich quick schemes would wither. I think as a society we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurial personalities that simply lack a means and understanding on how to apply those skills appropriately.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Beating the system is the point of get rich quick schemes.
  - crazydoggers 6y ago
    Yeah... it’s a sad pipe dream. You’re better off producing something of value to those around you.
DonHopkins 6y ago
I'm working on my second million! (...I gave up on my first.)
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
This guy would have no problem answering one specific question on the YCombinator application: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." <g> Game Shows -- apparently individually constitute such (non-computer) systems... (of which "Press Your Luck" was but one example...)

185 points by vinnyglennon 6y ago

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[deleted]

Brilliant story. This reminds me so much of David Foster Wallace's 'Little Expressionless Animals,' I wonder if DFW was aware of the broadcast and took it as inspiration

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Vaslo 6y ago

This is one of those stories I go back to reading about from time to time. I remember being a little boy home from school, either sick or summertime, and saw this episode. Well at least the first part where they had to freeze frame mid show and the show’s host Peter Tomarken walked out to tell everyone how Larson was making Game Show history. I was too young too know much about statistics, patterns, etc. to understand how impossible this could be if the board was truly random. Larson just seemed like an awkward but lucky and smart guy. Hearing this full story some years later shows how much we were in the dark on so many situations before the internet. As hard as you try to bulletproof things, there’s that one person who figures out a way to bypass it.

skrebbel 6y ago

Mad offtopic unimportant nitpick here. I'm so extremely put off when an author spends three paragraphs building up to an exciting climax, hits enter enter and then writes "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949". I had to skim half the article to find out how the story continued. Anecdotally, this strikes me as a uniquely American thing to do (or, at least, I've not read a single Dutch article pulling this trick), is there any point to it? Is it just something about eyeballs and ads? Do they teach this stuff in journalism school? Maybe Americans are immune to it because of the enormous amounts of "build up, build up, build up, almost there..... Let's continue after the messages! ^_^" on childhood TV?

rriepe 6y ago
Articles occasionally get made into movies, and therefore have a huge incentive to be movie-like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazine_articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazin...
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runawaybottle 6y ago
People write drunk bro, or on speed, especially Americans.
gfxgirl 6y ago
On many mobile sites (amp?) an ad is inserted every screenful of text so the longer the text the more ads. Not sure this is related but go look at english recipe sites. 10-15 screens of fluff to get to the recipe. It's clearly some kind of SEO or ad optimizing formula
- progre 6y ago
  I was complaining to my wife about this exact thing yesterday. Her reply: You do know we own like 20 printed cookbooks right? No ads in those...
FatalLogic 6y ago
Would you prefer the article to begin "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949. Although he was generally regarded as creative and intelligent, he had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful employment. One of his earliest exploits was in middle school ..."? No, you probably would stop reading after two lines of that. Because who cares about this ordinary-sounding guy? We have to know why he's interesting, first. Or would you prefer to not know about Larson's background, and just get the exciting part of the story? Maybe you would, but many people would be left feeling dissatisfied by that and halfway through they would be asking, "So, who is this guy Larson, where did he come from? What's the context behind all this crazy stuff he did?" Organizing a narrative is a difficult logistical challenge. Could you do it better?

OscarCunningham 6y ago

> Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. [...] They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time This doesn't seem possible. Surely someone who thought the way he did would have realised that you could sort the money in advance.

akdor1154 6y ago
n = 100_000 K = 2 # seconds time_secs = K * n * log(n) t = timedelta(seconds=time_secs) t # datetime.timedelta(days=26, seconds=56185, microseconds=92994) So around a month (at 24×7, so in reality more like 3 months) of time sorting if in a horrendous abuse of big O notation we assume that sorting the notes takes 2 * n * log(n) seconds. I guess he could use a pigeonhole sort though - at constant factor of 10 seconds this gives 11 days 49600 seconds.
- mamon 6y ago
  Bigger problem is that there are 11.7 B one dollar bills in circulation [1]. Even having that $100k sorted you still only stand 1: 117000 chance of winning. [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/how-many-dollar-bill-circulated/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/how-...
  - egman_ekki 6y ago
    But there is no downside (besides the time cost of the one-dollar-bill operation). If you don't win, you just put the money back to the bank. What is interesting is that you could theoretically deposit (part of) the money into your account and then withdraw somewhere else, so change the odds slightly.
    - FatalLogic 6y ago
      That searching is quite expensive, considering the odds (only one chance per day). Besides, there was also significant additional downside, which became obvious in this case: The risk of having a pile of cash in your house which could be stolen

ryanmercer 6y ago

Can we bring this game show back, and can I talk to the casting associate? I'd prefer to be a millionaire so I could be independently wealthy and do what I want instead of living just to pay bills, but if I could be a thousandaire, hey that is a nice start! I'm always amazed, despite being well aware of inflation, the cost of things/cash value of prizes in things of yesteryear. When you hear someone bought their house for something like 7,000 dollars or their brand new car for 2,400 dollars my monkey brain just refuses to stop for a second and go "yeah but inflation". Then there is the rabbit hole of goods that have gotten significantly cheaper over time, or even those that have been volatile at times (such as the spot price of silver and gold). Way too easy to get lost thinking about stuff like that.

jeofken 6y ago
Get ready for inflation to go absolutely nuts in the wake of last year. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1 People who own (fiat) currency or have their salaries denoted in $ will face tough times - Weimar style.
- spuz 6y ago
  Could you explain how your link backs up your claim?
  - irjustin 6y ago
    Not the poster, but the M1 denotes how much money gets printed. Because of COVID, for better or worse, US has been printing money like crazy to hand out and prop up different areas of the country. Whether you agree/disagree with this, that's for another thread. Point is, we're printing money. If you're familiar with inflation, stop here. Obviously the country and the world are not producing nor consuming at the same level. Thusly at an extremely extremely simplistic level, we're not creating more "intrinsic" value, but adding more printed money to represent that "intrinsic" value. Each dollar now has less "intrinsic" value. (this is over simplified to the n-th degree). This is the basis for inflation. Any unstable country would have seen hyper inflation given these numbers. So, the parent comment is alluding to this... eventually production has to catch up or inflation will.

Vinnl 6y ago

As someone who also stacked the odds in their favour on a gameshow [1], I can appreciate the effort but am also glad I never got as obsessed as this guy. Although my partner in crime (my brother) did just go on another winning streak on another gameshow [2], so maybe I should start worrying... [1] https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow or Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312 https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312 [2] https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-record-tom-roes-dagwinnaar-7-afleveringen-slimste-mens.html https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-recor...

mabbo 6y ago
As a non-Dutch speaker, I have to know- what was the joke?
- w0utert 6y ago
  For the second word he says 'my ex girlfriend...' and then guesses the dutch equivalent of the word 'cunt', basically.

Lio 6y ago

For some reason I thought this might be related to Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, which has monk like characters who lock themselves away for 1000 years. The article is a great read though, reminds me of a childhood friend who tried to build a light operated solenoid to beat fruit-machines on their stop the trail features. Long story short, it didn't work because the people who build fruit-machines were smart enough to randomise the latency of the button push.

kylewins 6y ago

Rough Calculation: 11.7 billion one dollar bills are in circulation today 100,000 / 11,700,000,000 Every Day 1 in Million Chance of Winning The guy was seemingly clever why not take the 5mins to find the odds or a few hours to ask the local math teacher...

hh3k0 6y ago
Yeah, I'd wager it was his laziness and proneness to shortcuts. One thing, though: Article states the radio show took place a few months after he won so probably 1984 or 1985. Federal Reserve website states that there were 7.5 billion one-dollar bills in circulation in 1999 (couldn't find numbers for years prior 1999). Increase of one-dollar bills in circulation seems to have fluctuated a lot over the course of years, might have been a significantly lower number in 1984/1985. I mean, it'd still be an impossibly long shot but I felt like pointing it out.
- kylewins 6y ago
  I was also thinking if the radio host was reading serial numbers from a specific newish year and the bank notes are more likely to be new then old maybe that would also increase the odds. Yeah, but I'll pass on that. Give me a job at walmart over reading serial numbers all day. Myth of sisphus
  - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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mywittyname 6y ago
Depending on how the serial number was chosen, the odds could be dramatically higher, dramatically lower, or zero. If the serial number was derived from another, new bill, received from a local bank, then the odds are quite good. If it is chosen by writing the serial number of a bill in your pocket, then circulating the bill by purchasing something. The odds go up if you happen to stop by the banks a few days after that happened, or they go to zero if the bill was not fit for circulation and it was removed by the Federal Reserve. Also, there's a good chance that a random serial number is not actually valid.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

I believe the title is referencing this classic: https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-be-groped-by-an-eleven-thousand-aire/n36926 https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-b...

alisonkisk 6y ago
No, both the OP and SNL are referring to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  WWtbaM came first. Then SNL made fun of it. Now the OP is leveraging both with a nod.
  - DamnInteresting 6y ago
    Author of the article here. I see why you drew that conclusion, but in this case, I was not aware of the similarly titled sketch until now. If I had been aware of it, I would have selected a different title for mine, to avoid the appearance of title pilferage. Mine was just a play on the game show title, essentially the same joke independently conceived.
    - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
      Thanks for chiming in to this internet digression from your actual statement. :)

code_duck 6y ago

Another discussion [2015]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713 Found this while trying to determine the definition of "unbeardily".

flerchin 6y ago

If he sorted the bills by serial number he could find out if he won the contest by binary search in around 17 cuts. His wife probably still would have stolen his money though.

crazydoggers 6y ago

It’s sad he spent so much of his time and energy on get rich quick schemes. Turns out it’s not quick nor easy... and the ROI when you could do something productive is very poor. I often think if we taught more about entrepreneurship in schools a lot of these get rich quick schemes would wither. I think as a society we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurial personalities that simply lack a means and understanding on how to apply those skills appropriately.

jackcosgrove 6y ago
Beating the system is the point of get rich quick schemes.
- crazydoggers 6y ago
  Yeah... it’s a sad pipe dream. You’re better off producing something of value to those around you.

DonHopkins 6y ago

I'm working on my second million! (...I gave up on my first.)

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

This guy would have no problem answering one specific question on the YCombinator application: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." <g> Game Shows -- apparently individually constitute such (non-computer) systems... (of which "Press Your Luck" was but one example...)