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> 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. M
by 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 agon = 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 agoBigger 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 agoBut 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 agoThat 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
- bluGill 6y agoBack when this contest was running bank savings accounts paid enough interest that there was a real loss of having all your money withdrawn. I'm not sure what year this was, so I can't look up the interest rate, but a couple thousand lost per month isn't an unreasonable estimate.
- kgwgk 6y ago20+% interest paid in a savings account (2% per month) seems unreasonable.
- bluGill 6y ago6%Apr, and a few hundred thousand.. 20% might have been possible briefly in the 1970s
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacurtis 6y ago> a couple thousand lost per month isn't an unreasonable estimate. This was the mid-to-late 80's... it wasn't THAT long ago. The majority of people reading this were alive back then. Yes interest rates were higher in the 80s and 90s, but not as high as you are insinuating. At this time (from my memory) you could expect about 1% per year in interest. Maybe upwards of 2% annual interest if you had a very generous deal with a bank, but even that is unlikely. At 1% a year, his $100,000 is generating ~$83 per month in interest. Granted he could do other things with his money to appreciate it. Which would increase his time value of money. But the opportunity cost of checking/savings account interest was pretty small. Granted the guy was stupid to begin with for even thinking he could win this contest and for putting $100k in cash in his house in case... I don't know, someone broke in or something... wait, that's what happened.
- OscarCunningham 6y agoI'd sort into 10 piles by first digit, and then sort each pile into ten piles by second digit. This would involve looking at each note twice, so at two seconds per note it would take 400000 seconds, or around 7 days of two people working 8 hours a day. The small piles would have 1000 notes in them, which is easy to check in a day.
- genera1 6y ago> The small piles would have 1000 notes in them, which is easy to check in a day. By the time you could even buy an 8-bit home computer for couple hundred dollars, store all the serial numbers on a floppy and simply search through them once per day
- OscarCunningham 6y agoThat would let you check instantly if you had that dollar, but you'd then have difficulty physically finding it.
- llampx 6y agoCreate an index. Sort the notes into sets of 1000 and label them, add the label as a column into your Foxpro database.
- mywittyname 6y agoMost likely scenario, you never look sort through it again. Least likely scenario, you get $30,000 (probably like $280,000 in today's money) to dig through them all one more time.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThat would take so much more time than sorting each batch of 1000 notes, and sorted notes let you do your daily check in less than a minute.
- frombody 6y agoI'm sure I'm missing something in this discussion, but why wouldn't you just OCR the serial numbers and put the results in a textfile and sort that?
- onionisafruit 6y agoThere’s a good chance the contest was a ruse and the disk jockey was reading a serial number off a dollar he just pulled from his wallet.
- eutectic 6y agoThat would be illegal.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt's only a crime if you get caught. Anyway, I know lotteries and gambling are regulated, what about e.g. radio or charity raffles?
- Loughla 6y agoYes, radio, charity, and other raffles are regulated. I encourage you to search for [your state] raffle statute. Or [your city/county] raffle statute.
- jacobr1 6y agoOne of the common regulations you often hear about is "no purchase necessary" - even for games where most player get a chance to win by purchasing a product, they still need to provide some other mechanism like mailing in a request.
- ehnto 6y agoJust because it is illegal doesn't mean it's not done. I've seen plenty of faux competitions ran successfully without consequence. Same with email signup regulations. Plenty of laws and regulations, yet it's really hard for people to get caught and fined for misbehaving.
- Retric 6y agoThe same is true of shoplifting etc. Getting caught has nothing to do with something being a crime.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoThis scheme was such a profound misunderstanding of probability. You have 100,000 of the billions of dollar bills in circulation, so what? And of course his faulty risk assessment bit him in the end from the liability of having $100,000 in cash lying around. If he had invested the $110k in the stock market in 1984 he would have been a millionaire at the time of his death in 1999, but crazies and normal people never see that. https://www.noelwhittaker.com.au/resources/calculators/stock-market-calculator/ https://www.noelwhittaker.com.au/resources/calculators/stock...
- stainforth 6y agoWhat does a dead guy do with a million dollars?
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoWhat did he do with the no money he had at death?
- paxys 6y agoIt's possible that he was only dead because he didn't have good health insurance/enough money for treatment.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYes, I have always ascribed to the get-rich-slow schemes and I encourage my children to do the same.
- andi999 6y agoCrazies and normal people cannot predict the future.
- jerf 6y agoYou don't need to fully sort it. You do a really, really partial radix sort and stop at step one or two, because you don't need a perfect sort, just to cut it down to a few hundred bills instead of a 100K. You trade an O(bucket size) linear search for the (log n) in the O(n log n) (assuming you optimally sort), which in computer terms is usually a bad idea but in this case, a significant savings.
- raldi 6y agoMaybe this synopsis is mistaken, and to make the game winnable, the actual contest was to be the first to bring in a bill containing a substring of digits, which sorting wouldn't help with.
- z3t4 6y agoNever underestimate sorting. Finding something in a sorted list is much faster then going through all items every time. For example when pairing socks, first sort them by color. Or when doing hit-box-detection in xyz, first sort by one of the axis.