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Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire?

217 points by choult 11y ago

gkop 11y ago
I love that if you google "unbeardily," all the results point to this story. Do you think it's a "trap street"?
seltzered 11y ago
As referenced at the end of the article, there's a This American Life podcast from a few years ago about the whole thing: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/million-dollar-idea http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m... Really worth the listen.
gcv 11y ago
Life imitates fiction? Jack London wrote a short story (part of the Smoke Bellew series) about something similar: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams
- knodi123 11y ago
  that was a fun way to waste a few minutes! thanks!
murbard2 11y ago
In case you're wondering, there are 8 digits on the one dollar bill serial number, so assuming a random draw by the DJ, the odds of one of the 100,000 dollars matching the draw every day would be very close to 1 in a thousand. After a year, you'd only have a 30.58% chance of winning at least once. The expected value of combing through the dollars to find a match would be about $30 every day. I wonder if he sorted them into a binary tree.
- meric 11y ago
  He was too focused on finding loopholes in rules of the world he lived in and did not realise there are robbers who didn't adhere to rules at all, robbers who made their own hole in his house.
- aetherson 11y ago
  Presumably the 10^8 space doesn't get exhausted, though. They don't run bills until they've literally printed 83,200,000,000 of them. So the operative question is how many bills were ever in circulation, not how big the theoretical space of the serial numbers are.
  - bitJericho 11y ago
    Well the dj would presumably be searching within the theoretical space, since he wouldn't have access to the list of actual serial numbers printed.
    - aetherson 11y ago
      Oh, maybe I didn't read it well enough. I thought he was pulling a bill out of his own pocket and then checking to see if anyone had a matching serial number. Does anyone know if the serial numbers are printed in order? I didn't see the answer in a very cursory web search. If they are, presumably it would be trivial for such a contest to avoid ever paying out -- just choose from the upper end of the SN range.
      - Adapt 11y ago
        Perhaps I don't understand your thought process, but how could anyone have a matching bill that way? If the DJ was reading off a serial number, the only person to have a match would be the DJ himself, since they are unique. Afaik, the only time serial numbers get reused is when a bill is reissued because it is damaged or worn, in which case they would shred the old bill (also, the new bill would get a neat star next to its serial number).
        Roedou 11y ago
        To begin, there are 32 bills on a sheet. In addition, they can re-run the process, but increment the letter portion of the serial each time. Depending on which parts of the serial number the DJ read off (just number, or number and letter), there could be up to 832 bills for a single serial number: http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html
- gus_massa 11y ago
  I guess a binary tree is not necessary. Just separate them in bricks by the first few digits, and sort them inside too. Then, just put all the bricks that start with 1 in the kitchen, the bricks that start with 2 in the bedroom, ... People is fast scaning a few items and select the right brick from the vault. (Disclaimer: I didn't try this at home.)
  - bkjelden 11y ago
    some sort of hashtable/BST hybrid - where each entry in the table points to a BST, and the hash function just returns the first base-10 digit off of the bill.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Can you imagine actually trying to sort 100,000 bills by serial number? Even if you can sort a bill every 10 seconds continuously, which you obviously can't, it would be about 7 weeks of full time work. Radio stations tend to run contests for what, a few months? So your expected return is perhaps a few thousand dollars. I can't imagine many worse jobs.
    - kragen 11y ago
      See my comment above for a better complexity analysis of this task.
- fenomas 11y ago
  Of course, the DJ might well have been reading a number off a bill from his own wallet each day, ensuring there'd be no payouts...
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. What kind of radio station has a $30,000 promo budget for a one off contest, especially in 1980s dollars. That's around $60,000 today. I imagine no one ever won that money.
  - MilnerRoute 11y ago
    I was thinking that too. Especially if word ever reached the radio station that some guy just had just withdrawn 100,000 dollar bills from his bank...
- lotu 11y ago
  I think it obvious that he did not sort the bills. The article say that he and his wife spend all their time going through stacks of bills, stopping only to eat and bathe (and they couldn't even check all the money in time). If they sorted the money it would have taken him looking at under 20 bills to determin if he had the matching bill or not.
  - kragen 11y ago
    So they lost because that was what happens when a hacker doesn't take the time to learn about algorithms and data structures, eh? I think you could probably, after some practice, radix-sort bills into a 10×10 array by a digit pair at about 4Hz by hand, maybe 1Hz at the outset. 100k / 4Hz would be about 7 hours, so your initial sort pass (with piles averaging 1000 bills) would take 7 to 28 hours. A second sort pass over the next most significant digits would take another 7 hours, and then the bills would be sorted into groups of about 10. At that point you'd want to put the money into, say, a thousand or ten thousand envelopes, organized into drawers or folders or something, so that when the DJ calls the number, you open the right drawer, pick out the right envelope, and scan through the five, ten, or twenty bills in there to find the right one, if you have it. You could do the passes lazily, too. Spend the 7 (or 28) hours to do the first sorting pass into piles of 1000. Then, when the DJ reads out the number, pick out the right pile of 1000 and spend 4 minutes sorting it into 100 piles of 10 or so, which you then stuff into 100 envelopes, possibly calling the DJ at the time. If the DJ calls another number with the same leading two digits, you're prepared; if not, hey, it's 4 minutes. So you're right. Sad. He legit hacked the Press Your Luck show by figuring out hidden patterns that he could use to do the apparently impossible. Too bad he didn't have the knowledge to hack the DJ's contest. Sadder still that he let the money come ahead of his girlfriend.
    - tempestn 11y ago
      I certainly agree with you that sorting makes sense, and that sounds like a logical algorithm. I think 4Hz, or even 1Hz, is wildly optimistic though. 100,000 bills is bags and bags of cash. You're going to be spending a lot of time dealing with the envelopes and folders and things. You're certainly not going to be able to make 10 piles of 10,000 bills each in front of you. As soon as you get more than a few bills in a pile you'll need to spend time straightening them, putting them in envelopes or whatever, pulling more bills out of the bags, etc. Not to mention resting your hands and eyes. You could make it easier with cash trays or something to keep them from flying all over the place as you sort, but even so, there's no way you're going to be firing out more than one a second continuously for hours.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lectrick 11y ago
  I feel like this is a guy who is in that danger zone of intelligence where he can recognize an opportunity before others but doesn't have enough lightbulbs on to power through it properly. He could have really used some CS/math coursework
  - devonkim 11y ago
    I think this is where a lot of small-time criminals lie in the spectrum of intellectual capacity I'd say. Add in some arrogance / conceit and you have a recipe for distrust / hatred of authority including those that might actually be smarter than you. He fell victim to a number of pyramid / Ponzi schemes after all.
  - kelvin0 11y ago
    I think it's more a combination of being creative with above avergage intelligence and determination coupled with low risk assessment (poor judgement).
- saalweachter 11y ago
  Your expected value calculation is also missing an important factor. He had a ~30% chance of being +$30k after a year, sure, and he probably did that math. But he also had a non-zero chance of being -$100k through robbery. He was spinning the wheel each day the cash was in the house, with less control over the odds than he had on the game show, and in the end he whammied after all.
- MilnerRoute 11y ago
  Yeah, the problem is you have to sort your 100,000 dollar bills. If you had 100 boxes with 1,000 bills each -- maybe sorted into 10 smaller stacks of 1000 bills each -- then you'd only have to spend a few minutes each day checking whether you'd won. But how long would it take to sort out those 100,000 dollar bills in the first place?
jmkni 11y ago
Well that blog certainly lives up to its' name! Fascinating! Has anybody ever worked out what he did?
- barbs 11y ago
  Damninteresting.com is a truly underrated website. I bought their book a few years ago, which was a collation of nearly all their articles up to the time of print. They're listed in the book alphabetically, but every article was fascinating and well-written, regardless of topic. I highly recommend it if you have time and/or need a reason to procrastinate :).
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
Seems a sad waste of a life. A shame - I wonder what turns a boy into that man?
- meric 11y ago
  An initiation ritual.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Keyframe 11y ago
Here's show about it/him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ
- cgag 11y ago
  The full unedited episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU
narrator 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy had a tough time dealing with people and couldn't stand working for anyone or managing employees. I think if he was born 20 years later he would have gambled all his money away on day trading schemes. There are a lot of losers out there -- isolated, paranoid and looking for their loophole in the system. They'd be just fine if they'd realize that getting some social skills and learning to work well with others would fix most of their problems with the world.
- solve 11y ago
  He didn't want to live an ok life and fix his problems. This is a man who wanted to find a way to the very top.
  - narrator 11y ago
    His failing thought was that he thought he could get to the top by himself by executing some tricky scheme, as if he were some sort of comic book character. It did work for him, for a bit. However, most people who don't win the lottery get to the top with the help and cooperation of a lot of other people. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who was trusting enough to develop relationships such that he could advance in life.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      Some think the game that we're all invited to play (i.e. the one you're advocating) is rigged. Indeed, they would say that the real "losers" are the ones who think they can beat it by working harder.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  If the definition of "loser" is being isolated, paranoid, and looking for a loophole in the system, then nearly every philosopher qualifies. The word loser is a shitty judgmental word, almost always used perjoratively, and never descriptively.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
withdavidli 11y ago
Reminds me of this article about scratch cards and how some are not random: http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/ http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/ Always interesting to read about people being about to connect the dots in what most people would consider complete randomness / chance / luck.
dbbolton 11y ago
There is a documentary about the incident called "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal" on Youtube: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEBCve-3Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEBCve-3Cw * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ as well as the original episode itself: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI (better quality, split into parts) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU (lower quality, whole episode)
bhandziuk 11y ago
I initially thought "Wait Jon Carpenter won 1M $ on Who Wants To Be Millionaire in 1999" which is way before 2006. I guess what the last paragraph of the article meant to say was "Michael Larson held the record for the most DAYTIME game-show winnings in a single day until". Millionaire was not a Daytime show.
- toast0 11y ago
  Millionaire is a multi episode (day) process, as well
webnrrd2k 11y ago
He reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld, in the movie Real Genius, who won 31.8% of the prizes in a Frito-Lay sweepstakes by submitting 1,650,000 entries. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want”.
- gertef 11y ago
  Some of Real Genius was adapted from real pranks perpetrated at Caltech and elsewhere.
- mark-r 11y ago
  For a long time that movie was not available on DVD. I'm glad they finally rectified that.
cgabios 11y ago
Voltaire would be proud [0], the dude cracked their non-CSPRNG fair and square. 0: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-winning-the-lottery/ http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-wi...
hurin 11y ago
I don't understand why the producers thought it was such a horrible thing (according to the article) -- surely they are making several magnitudes of the cost per episode, this kind of thing should provide promotional value more than anything else.
- kamaal 11y ago
  They are doing the show to make money not to make ordinary people rich. If people start getting rich, the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's. According to them this is about fun and entertainment, a little winning here and there is ok. But winning big is a problem here.
  - hurin 11y ago
    > the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's. The math nerd's winning at Las Vegas casinos probably brings more profit in terms of suckers that read "bringing down the house" and an introductory black-jack counting book then they could cost ever them. The Casino's hard-line against this is some kind of deep-seated and antagonistic mob-mentality more than any actual losses.
downandout 11y ago
It's amazing how many people in the world are looking for "easy" money that is actually much harder to obtain than legitimate money. For example, the odds of winning more than $1 million in any lottery in the US are nearly always less than 1 in 10 million. By contrast, the odds of a US adult becoming a newly minted millionaire in a given year are about 1 in 420 [1]. While the idea of living by your wits alone seems to appeal to many people, the reality is that for most people "easy" money comes from work, entrepreneurship (in many cases), and investing wisely. [1] According to http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/14/news/economy/us-millionaires-households/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/14/news/economy/us-millionaires... more than 600,000 new millionaires were minted in the US in 2013, out of an adult population (age 18+) of roughly 250 million. Thus 1 in 417 US adults became a new millionaire in 2013. The odds are actually much better than this among people actively trying to become millionaires, because most US adults are not engaging in activities that could possibly position them to achieve this.
- elchief 11y ago
  Well, a lot of those new millionaires are simply people moving from a ~$950k worth...
- idlewords 11y ago
  For most people, easy money comes from being born to rich parents.
- geofft 11y ago
  Aggregate odds are not individual odds. About one in three of my meals are breakfast, but the odds of my next meal being breakfast are incredibly low. If you want to convince someone that a lottery is a bad bet, you have to convince them that working and investing is a better investment for them: it's irrelevant that it's a better investment for the public as a whole. And the people who market lotteries know that, and choose who they target based on that. You'll see more ads for lotteries on the subway than you will in an in-flight magazine.
  - stevoski 11y ago
    I like this breakfast example. BTW: Pick a random moment from a 24-hour period, and there is a better than 50% chance that my next meal is breakfast.
benihana 11y ago
This kind of thing is less about easy money and more about outsmarting people. This guy wasn't trying to make an easy buck, he was trying to make a buck by outwitting other people, beating them, winning. It's antisocial (in a clinical rather than pop culture sense) behavior. The guy seems to have the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. [1] I'm just an internet commenter though, not a psychologist, so take it for what it's worth. 1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
- mahranch 11y ago
  I think it's more than that. I got a vibe that something wasn't right with the guy just looking at the first picture of him and pushed aside the feeling believing it to be just an old picture. Then, at the very beginning of the article, there's a bit where one of the producers said that something didn't feel right about the guy but they couldn't quite put their finger on it. That's one of the biggest tell-tale signs of a sociopath. I couldn't piece together much about his personality from the article, but I'd bet a Jackson that this guy was a sociopath.
  - meric 11y ago
    He is what he is. Everyone here knows he's not the type who would work well in a career, have a best friend who he meets every week for a beer, marry his girlfriend and have 2.2 kids. What do you achieve by calling him a sociopath? Everyone has their place in this society, even if it's to punish TV shows and radio programs who don't do randomisation properly. He was an arbitrageur for TV programs. What have we to gain by calling him a sociopath?..Not like you have to be friends with him. He made his winnings from a TV show, fair and square, even if contrived.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    "I don't know what I'm talking about, but this guy feels off, and I don't like that, so rather than examining my own biases and predjudices and irrationalities I'm going to use mental health language to give him a (controversial, relatively new) diagnosis from thecomfort of my armchair". This attitude fucking sucks.
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
the real Del Boy
gcb0 11y ago
the couple spent months counting and cataloging the serial number of their money for a radio contents, and when the money was stolen police was unable to find it?
thoman23 11y ago
Among the many interesting things in this story is the reaction of the show producers and how different things were back then. Today's producers would jump ALL OVER this and make him a huge celebrity, driving up ratings and attention for the show. It seems absurd to think of not airing the show at all.
- carussell 11y ago
  Counterexample: Terry Kniess
thoman23 11y ago
I think it's important to recognize that he still assumed some risk with each spin. That risk was reduced from 1/6 to some much smaller number, but the risk was not zero. His concentration or timing could fail on any given spin, as evidenced by his final spin where he mistimed it but got lucky. My point is that I don't think you can say he was cheating. He played within the rules of the game and couldn't just drain cash out of the system forever.
- tempestn 11y ago
  Totally. He found a way to turn it from a game of luck into a game of skill. Rather like counting cards at Blackjack (although with more of the luck removed, and with a much better expected return!)
  - bitwize 11y ago
    Yes, and if you are caught card counting at Blackjack, big burly men will come and eject you from the casino. Just because you didn't technically break the rules doesn't mean the house thinks you played fair. Hint: for them "fair" = "house wins". (For a gameshow, winning entails making much more in advertising money than they have to pay out in prizes and spend to produce the show.)
    - tempestn 11y ago
      Indeed, that's part of why I figured it was a good analogy.
- georgiecasey 11y ago
  i just watched the show and he hit spaces other than 4 and 8 a few times. was he just lucky those few times or did i miss something? here's one example when he hit space 6 and 'pick a corner': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0phlwtxwFU&feature=youtu.be&t=394 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0phlwtxwFU&feature=youtu.be...
kragen 11y ago
I wish I could disavow this guy as a hacker, but he was clearly a hacker. And I think this story demonstrates a kind of weakness that we're all a bit prone to. (See my deeper comment for algorithmic analysis.)
petethomas 11y ago
Watching the GSN video on YouTube I was struck by the generic presentation of non-cash prizes. Press Your Luck was apparently content to just mention the contestant won a "Sailboat" without tethering it to a brand which seems like overlooked opportunity even for the simpler time since contemporaries like The Price Is Right were integrating brands into their show.
__z 11y ago
I had read somewhere (don't recall where) that a few other people had figured out the patterns too but just didn't make it to be contestants.
shade23 11y ago
And I shall keep staying on website with the server down page because even that is fun to read.Someone please comment when the site is up and running again.
JanneVee 11y ago
Ah, I learned a new colloquialism today with their error message for an overloaded server. "... accidentally Lennie us." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lennie http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lennie
adam-a 11y ago
Seems to be down. Archive.org version from last year: http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damninteresting.com/who-wants-to-be-a-thousandaire http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damnint...
- octatoan 11y ago
  Doesn't work.
mazizzletizzl 11y ago
How much does the seated bearded guy in front of the array of screens, in the image a third of a way down the article, look like the Architect from the Matrix architect scene? Is that where the Wachowskis actually got their inspiration -- that bizarre episode? "Your life is the remainder of an unbalanced equation..." And there's Larsson rebalancing the equation for all the times other people unluckily had their winnings taken by pressing their like one more time.
MilnerRoute 11y ago
Bill Murray once agreed to appear in a film adaptation of this story (directed by Nicolas Cage). http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=116245 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=116245

217 points by choult 11y ago

gkop 11y ago

I love that if you google "unbeardily," all the results point to this story. Do you think it's a "trap street"?

As referenced at the end of the article, there's a This American Life podcast from a few years ago about the whole thing: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/million-dollar-idea http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m... Really worth the listen.

gcv 11y ago

Life imitates fiction? Jack London wrote a short story (part of the Smoke Bellew series) about something similar: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams

knodi123 11y ago
that was a fun way to waste a few minutes! thanks!

murbard2 11y ago

In case you're wondering, there are 8 digits on the one dollar bill serial number, so assuming a random draw by the DJ, the odds of one of the 100,000 dollars matching the draw every day would be very close to 1 in a thousand. After a year, you'd only have a 30.58% chance of winning at least once. The expected value of combing through the dollars to find a match would be about $30 every day. I wonder if he sorted them into a binary tree.

meric 11y ago
He was too focused on finding loopholes in rules of the world he lived in and did not realise there are robbers who didn't adhere to rules at all, robbers who made their own hole in his house.
aetherson 11y ago
Presumably the 10^8 space doesn't get exhausted, though. They don't run bills until they've literally printed 83,200,000,000 of them. So the operative question is how many bills were ever in circulation, not how big the theoretical space of the serial numbers are.
- bitJericho 11y ago
  Well the dj would presumably be searching within the theoretical space, since he wouldn't have access to the list of actual serial numbers printed.
  - aetherson 11y ago
    Oh, maybe I didn't read it well enough. I thought he was pulling a bill out of his own pocket and then checking to see if anyone had a matching serial number. Does anyone know if the serial numbers are printed in order? I didn't see the answer in a very cursory web search. If they are, presumably it would be trivial for such a contest to avoid ever paying out -- just choose from the upper end of the SN range.
    - Adapt 11y ago
      Perhaps I don't understand your thought process, but how could anyone have a matching bill that way? If the DJ was reading off a serial number, the only person to have a match would be the DJ himself, since they are unique. Afaik, the only time serial numbers get reused is when a bill is reissued because it is damaged or worn, in which case they would shred the old bill (also, the new bill would get a neat star next to its serial number).
      - Roedou 11y ago
        To begin, there are 32 bills on a sheet. In addition, they can re-run the process, but increment the letter portion of the serial each time. Depending on which parts of the serial number the DJ read off (just number, or number and letter), there could be up to 832 bills for a single serial number: http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html
gus_massa 11y ago
I guess a binary tree is not necessary. Just separate them in bricks by the first few digits, and sort them inside too. Then, just put all the bricks that start with 1 in the kitchen, the bricks that start with 2 in the bedroom, ... People is fast scaning a few items and select the right brick from the vault. (Disclaimer: I didn't try this at home.)
- bkjelden 11y ago
  some sort of hashtable/BST hybrid - where each entry in the table points to a BST, and the hash function just returns the first base-10 digit off of the bill.
- tempestn 11y ago
  Can you imagine actually trying to sort 100,000 bills by serial number? Even if you can sort a bill every 10 seconds continuously, which you obviously can't, it would be about 7 weeks of full time work. Radio stations tend to run contests for what, a few months? So your expected return is perhaps a few thousand dollars. I can't imagine many worse jobs.
  - kragen 11y ago
    See my comment above for a better complexity analysis of this task.
fenomas 11y ago
Of course, the DJ might well have been reading a number off a bill from his own wallet each day, ensuring there'd be no payouts...
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. What kind of radio station has a $30,000 promo budget for a one off contest, especially in 1980s dollars. That's around $60,000 today. I imagine no one ever won that money.
- MilnerRoute 11y ago
  I was thinking that too. Especially if word ever reached the radio station that some guy just had just withdrawn 100,000 dollar bills from his bank...
lotu 11y ago
I think it obvious that he did not sort the bills. The article say that he and his wife spend all their time going through stacks of bills, stopping only to eat and bathe (and they couldn't even check all the money in time). If they sorted the money it would have taken him looking at under 20 bills to determin if he had the matching bill or not.
- kragen 11y ago
  So they lost because that was what happens when a hacker doesn't take the time to learn about algorithms and data structures, eh? I think you could probably, after some practice, radix-sort bills into a 10×10 array by a digit pair at about 4Hz by hand, maybe 1Hz at the outset. 100k / 4Hz would be about 7 hours, so your initial sort pass (with piles averaging 1000 bills) would take 7 to 28 hours. A second sort pass over the next most significant digits would take another 7 hours, and then the bills would be sorted into groups of about 10. At that point you'd want to put the money into, say, a thousand or ten thousand envelopes, organized into drawers or folders or something, so that when the DJ calls the number, you open the right drawer, pick out the right envelope, and scan through the five, ten, or twenty bills in there to find the right one, if you have it. You could do the passes lazily, too. Spend the 7 (or 28) hours to do the first sorting pass into piles of 1000. Then, when the DJ reads out the number, pick out the right pile of 1000 and spend 4 minutes sorting it into 100 piles of 10 or so, which you then stuff into 100 envelopes, possibly calling the DJ at the time. If the DJ calls another number with the same leading two digits, you're prepared; if not, hey, it's 4 minutes. So you're right. Sad. He legit hacked the Press Your Luck show by figuring out hidden patterns that he could use to do the apparently impossible. Too bad he didn't have the knowledge to hack the DJ's contest. Sadder still that he let the money come ahead of his girlfriend.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    I certainly agree with you that sorting makes sense, and that sounds like a logical algorithm. I think 4Hz, or even 1Hz, is wildly optimistic though. 100,000 bills is bags and bags of cash. You're going to be spending a lot of time dealing with the envelopes and folders and things. You're certainly not going to be able to make 10 piles of 10,000 bills each in front of you. As soon as you get more than a few bills in a pile you'll need to spend time straightening them, putting them in envelopes or whatever, pulling more bills out of the bags, etc. Not to mention resting your hands and eyes. You could make it easier with cash trays or something to keep them from flying all over the place as you sort, but even so, there's no way you're going to be firing out more than one a second continuously for hours.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lectrick 11y ago
I feel like this is a guy who is in that danger zone of intelligence where he can recognize an opportunity before others but doesn't have enough lightbulbs on to power through it properly. He could have really used some CS/math coursework
- devonkim 11y ago
  I think this is where a lot of small-time criminals lie in the spectrum of intellectual capacity I'd say. Add in some arrogance / conceit and you have a recipe for distrust / hatred of authority including those that might actually be smarter than you. He fell victim to a number of pyramid / Ponzi schemes after all.
- kelvin0 11y ago
  I think it's more a combination of being creative with above avergage intelligence and determination coupled with low risk assessment (poor judgement).
saalweachter 11y ago
Your expected value calculation is also missing an important factor. He had a ~30% chance of being +$30k after a year, sure, and he probably did that math. But he also had a non-zero chance of being -$100k through robbery. He was spinning the wheel each day the cash was in the house, with less control over the odds than he had on the game show, and in the end he whammied after all.
MilnerRoute 11y ago
Yeah, the problem is you have to sort your 100,000 dollar bills. If you had 100 boxes with 1,000 bills each -- maybe sorted into 10 smaller stacks of 1000 bills each -- then you'd only have to spend a few minutes each day checking whether you'd won. But how long would it take to sort out those 100,000 dollar bills in the first place?

jmkni 11y ago

Well that blog certainly lives up to its' name! Fascinating! Has anybody ever worked out what he did?

barbs 11y ago
Damninteresting.com is a truly underrated website. I bought their book a few years ago, which was a collation of nearly all their articles up to the time of print. They're listed in the book alphabetically, but every article was fascinating and well-written, regardless of topic. I highly recommend it if you have time and/or need a reason to procrastinate :).

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

Seems a sad waste of a life. A shame - I wonder what turns a boy into that man?

meric 11y ago
An initiation ritual.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Keyframe 11y ago

Here's show about it/him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ

cgag 11y ago
The full unedited episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU

narrator 11y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy had a tough time dealing with people and couldn't stand working for anyone or managing employees. I think if he was born 20 years later he would have gambled all his money away on day trading schemes. There are a lot of losers out there -- isolated, paranoid and looking for their loophole in the system. They'd be just fine if they'd realize that getting some social skills and learning to work well with others would fix most of their problems with the world.

solve 11y ago
He didn't want to live an ok life and fix his problems. This is a man who wanted to find a way to the very top.
- narrator 11y ago
  His failing thought was that he thought he could get to the top by himself by executing some tricky scheme, as if he were some sort of comic book character. It did work for him, for a bit. However, most people who don't win the lottery get to the top with the help and cooperation of a lot of other people. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who was trusting enough to develop relationships such that he could advance in life.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Some think the game that we're all invited to play (i.e. the one you're advocating) is rigged. Indeed, they would say that the real "losers" are the ones who think they can beat it by working harder.
littletimmy 11y ago
If the definition of "loser" is being isolated, paranoid, and looking for a loophole in the system, then nearly every philosopher qualifies. The word loser is a shitty judgmental word, almost always used perjoratively, and never descriptively.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

withdavidli 11y ago

Reminds me of this article about scratch cards and how some are not random: http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/ http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/ Always interesting to read about people being about to connect the dots in what most people would consider complete randomness / chance / luck.

dbbolton 11y ago

There is a documentary about the incident called "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal" on Youtube: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEBCve-3Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEBCve-3Cw * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ as well as the original episode itself: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI (better quality, split into parts) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU (lower quality, whole episode)

bhandziuk 11y ago

I initially thought "Wait Jon Carpenter won 1M $ on Who Wants To Be Millionaire in 1999" which is way before 2006. I guess what the last paragraph of the article meant to say was "Michael Larson held the record for the most DAYTIME game-show winnings in a single day until". Millionaire was not a Daytime show.

toast0 11y ago
Millionaire is a multi episode (day) process, as well

webnrrd2k 11y ago

He reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld, in the movie Real Genius, who won 31.8% of the prizes in a Frito-Lay sweepstakes by submitting 1,650,000 entries. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want”.

gertef 11y ago
Some of Real Genius was adapted from real pranks perpetrated at Caltech and elsewhere.
mark-r 11y ago
For a long time that movie was not available on DVD. I'm glad they finally rectified that.

cgabios 11y ago

Voltaire would be proud [0], the dude cracked their non-CSPRNG fair and square. 0: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-winning-the-lottery/ http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-wi...

hurin 11y ago

I don't understand why the producers thought it was such a horrible thing (according to the article) -- surely they are making several magnitudes of the cost per episode, this kind of thing should provide promotional value more than anything else.

kamaal 11y ago
They are doing the show to make money not to make ordinary people rich. If people start getting rich, the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's. According to them this is about fun and entertainment, a little winning here and there is ok. But winning big is a problem here.
- hurin 11y ago
  > the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's. The math nerd's winning at Las Vegas casinos probably brings more profit in terms of suckers that read "bringing down the house" and an introductory black-jack counting book then they could cost ever them. The Casino's hard-line against this is some kind of deep-seated and antagonistic mob-mentality more than any actual losses.

downandout 11y ago

It's amazing how many people in the world are looking for "easy" money that is actually much harder to obtain than legitimate money. For example, the odds of winning more than $1 million in any lottery in the US are nearly always less than 1 in 10 million. By contrast, the odds of a US adult becoming a newly minted millionaire in a given year are about 1 in 420 [1]. While the idea of living by your wits alone seems to appeal to many people, the reality is that for most people "easy" money comes from work, entrepreneurship (in many cases), and investing wisely. [1] According to http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/14/news/economy/us-millionaires-households/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/14/news/economy/us-millionaires... more than 600,000 new millionaires were minted in the US in 2013, out of an adult population (age 18+) of roughly 250 million. Thus 1 in 417 US adults became a new millionaire in 2013. The odds are actually much better than this among people actively trying to become millionaires, because most US adults are not engaging in activities that could possibly position them to achieve this.

elchief 11y ago
Well, a lot of those new millionaires are simply people moving from a ~$950k worth...
idlewords 11y ago
For most people, easy money comes from being born to rich parents.
geofft 11y ago
Aggregate odds are not individual odds. About one in three of my meals are breakfast, but the odds of my next meal being breakfast are incredibly low. If you want to convince someone that a lottery is a bad bet, you have to convince them that working and investing is a better investment for them: it's irrelevant that it's a better investment for the public as a whole. And the people who market lotteries know that, and choose who they target based on that. You'll see more ads for lotteries on the subway than you will in an in-flight magazine.
- stevoski 11y ago
  I like this breakfast example. BTW: Pick a random moment from a 24-hour period, and there is a better than 50% chance that my next meal is breakfast.

benihana 11y ago

This kind of thing is less about easy money and more about outsmarting people. This guy wasn't trying to make an easy buck, he was trying to make a buck by outwitting other people, beating them, winning. It's antisocial (in a clinical rather than pop culture sense) behavior. The guy seems to have the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. [1] I'm just an internet commenter though, not a psychologist, so take it for what it's worth. 1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

mahranch 11y ago
I think it's more than that. I got a vibe that something wasn't right with the guy just looking at the first picture of him and pushed aside the feeling believing it to be just an old picture. Then, at the very beginning of the article, there's a bit where one of the producers said that something didn't feel right about the guy but they couldn't quite put their finger on it. That's one of the biggest tell-tale signs of a sociopath. I couldn't piece together much about his personality from the article, but I'd bet a Jackson that this guy was a sociopath.
- meric 11y ago
  He is what he is. Everyone here knows he's not the type who would work well in a career, have a best friend who he meets every week for a beer, marry his girlfriend and have 2.2 kids. What do you achieve by calling him a sociopath? Everyone has their place in this society, even if it's to punish TV shows and radio programs who don't do randomisation properly. He was an arbitrageur for TV programs. What have we to gain by calling him a sociopath?..Not like you have to be friends with him. He made his winnings from a TV show, fair and square, even if contrived.
- DanBC 11y ago
  "I don't know what I'm talking about, but this guy feels off, and I don't like that, so rather than examining my own biases and predjudices and irrationalities I'm going to use mental health language to give him a (controversial, relatively new) diagnosis from thecomfort of my armchair". This attitude fucking sucks.

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

the real Del Boy

gcb0 11y ago

the couple spent months counting and cataloging the serial number of their money for a radio contents, and when the money was stolen police was unable to find it?

thoman23 11y ago

Among the many interesting things in this story is the reaction of the show producers and how different things were back then. Today's producers would jump ALL OVER this and make him a huge celebrity, driving up ratings and attention for the show. It seems absurd to think of not airing the show at all.

carussell 11y ago
Counterexample: Terry Kniess

thoman23 11y ago

I think it's important to recognize that he still assumed some risk with each spin. That risk was reduced from 1/6 to some much smaller number, but the risk was not zero. His concentration or timing could fail on any given spin, as evidenced by his final spin where he mistimed it but got lucky. My point is that I don't think you can say he was cheating. He played within the rules of the game and couldn't just drain cash out of the system forever.

tempestn 11y ago
Totally. He found a way to turn it from a game of luck into a game of skill. Rather like counting cards at Blackjack (although with more of the luck removed, and with a much better expected return!)
- bitwize 11y ago
  Yes, and if you are caught card counting at Blackjack, big burly men will come and eject you from the casino. Just because you didn't technically break the rules doesn't mean the house thinks you played fair. Hint: for them "fair" = "house wins". (For a gameshow, winning entails making much more in advertising money than they have to pay out in prizes and spend to produce the show.)
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Indeed, that's part of why I figured it was a good analogy.
georgiecasey 11y ago
i just watched the show and he hit spaces other than 4 and 8 a few times. was he just lucky those few times or did i miss something? here's one example when he hit space 6 and 'pick a corner': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0phlwtxwFU&feature=youtu.be&t=394 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0phlwtxwFU&feature=youtu.be...

kragen 11y ago

I wish I could disavow this guy as a hacker, but he was clearly a hacker. And I think this story demonstrates a kind of weakness that we're all a bit prone to. (See my deeper comment for algorithmic analysis.)

petethomas 11y ago

Watching the GSN video on YouTube I was struck by the generic presentation of non-cash prizes. Press Your Luck was apparently content to just mention the contestant won a "Sailboat" without tethering it to a brand which seems like overlooked opportunity even for the simpler time since contemporaries like The Price Is Right were integrating brands into their show.

__z 11y ago

I had read somewhere (don't recall where) that a few other people had figured out the patterns too but just didn't make it to be contestants.

shade23 11y ago

And I shall keep staying on website with the server down page because even that is fun to read.Someone please comment when the site is up and running again.

JanneVee 11y ago

Ah, I learned a new colloquialism today with their error message for an overloaded server. "... accidentally Lennie us." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lennie http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lennie

adam-a 11y ago

Seems to be down. Archive.org version from last year: http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damninteresting.com/who-wants-to-be-a-thousandaire http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damnint...

octatoan 11y ago
Doesn't work.

mazizzletizzl 11y ago

How much does the seated bearded guy in front of the array of screens, in the image a third of a way down the article, look like the Architect from the Matrix architect scene? Is that where the Wachowskis actually got their inspiration -- that bizarre episode? "Your life is the remainder of an unbalanced equation..." And there's Larsson rebalancing the equation for all the times other people unluckily had their winnings taken by pressing their like one more time.

MilnerRoute 11y ago

Bill Murray once agreed to appear in a film adaptation of this story (directed by Nicolas Cage). http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=116245 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=116245