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This is Sarah Spain from Good Game with Sarah Spain, brought to you in part by Vital Farms. Let me tell you why Vital Farms pasture-raised eggs are the only eggs I have in my fridge. The hens. They're living the good life, fresh air, sunshine, and wide open pastures. I use my Vital Farms for my famous frittatas.
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And now Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia. Tells the story of the time Michael Larson surprisingly beat the game show Press Your Luck. Here's Matt. Yeah. The best TV game shows sit at the intersection of skill.
and luck. And in the nineteen eighties there was one such game show called Press Your Luck. The skill component came from asking the contestants trivia questions. But then the luck came in via the big board. This is how prizes were dished out after a contestant had demonstrated their skill answering a trivia question.
It was a massive screen with 18 boxes detailing different cash amounts or physical prizes and a cartoon character known as a whammy. The highlight on the board would rapidly flip between the different boxes in an apparently random order. The players would then win the content of whichever box was selected when they hit their buzzer, but if they landed on a whammy, the player would lose all the prizes they had accumulated so far.
Okay, I want a trip, let's go, please! Take your time, okay? Stop. Stop. Um The system would never linger on one box long enough for the player to see what it was, react and then hit their buzzer.
And because the movement was unpredictable, it was theoretically impossible for the player to anticipate which box was going to be selected.
So they were picking at random. And most players would win a few prizes before retiring for that round. Other players of course would press their luck and get whammied. I mean That was the idea in theory. Yeah.
Michael Larson was an ice cream truck driver from Ohio, and they decided to see just how random the big board really was.
So they taped some shows when it first started airing in 1983 and they poured over the footage, trying to crack if there were any underlying patterns. And sure enough, They noticed that the board only had Probably. Predetermined cycles. They just went through them so fast that they looked random.
So Michael set about memorizing those five cycles, working out exactly when the optimum point to buzz in for each one would be, and then they flew out to Los Angeles and unbelievably managed to get themselves on the show as a contestant. Um Mm-hmm. The game starts normally enough. Michael was competing against Ed, a Baptist minister, and Janie, a dental assistant. Michael answers enough trivia questions correctly to earn some spins on the big board, and on his first go, he hits a whammy.
By the start of the second round, Michael is in last place, but his trivia knowledge has just earned him seven more spins on the big board. This time, he does not hit a whammy. Oh no, he lands on $1,250. Hey, no whammies, no whammies. Come on, big bucks.
I need lots of money, come on, yo see it. Stop! Stop! At $1,250. One spin left.
1250 Michael. And then on the next spin, $1,250 again. Stop! Stop! Act 150!
And then $4,000, $5,000, $1,000, a holiday, $4,000, and so on. As most of the prizes also come with a free spin, his reign on the big board seems to be everlasting. At first, the host, Peter Tamakin goes through his normal patter, waiting for Michael to hit a whammy. But Michael doesn't. In a freak of probability, Michael keeps selecting prize after prize.
It is amazing to watch the range of emotions the host goes through. Initially, he's excited, something unlikely is happening, but soon he's trying to work out what on earth is going on while still maintaining his jovial game show host persona. Stop it, five under that skin. Apparently, behind the scenes, chaos was breaking out as show executives and channel directors were trying to work out: was Michael cheating? How was this happening?
To their eyes, Michael seemed to be celebrating too soon. He was pleased when he buzzed in in less time than he conceivably could have been reading the prize that he had won.
Somehow, he already knew when to press the buzzer and which square he wanted to stop on.
Now, of course, all of this could have been avoided if the game show big board was actually random. Then Michael wouldn't have been able to pour over the footage on VHS and memorize the five different cycles. But the designers of the Pressure Luck system had hard-coded set cycles instead of making it truly random, because being random, is very difficult. There's not even really a case of it being difficult for computers to do something randomly. It's pretty much impossible.
No computer can be random unaided. Computers are built to follow instructions precisely. Processors are built to predictably do the correct thing every time. Making a computer do something unexpected is a very difficult feat. You can't have a line of programming code that says do something truly random without also having a specialized component attached to the computer to provide the randomness.
Oh no. The extreme version of this is to build a 2 meter high motorized conveyor belt that dips into a bucket of about 200 dice and lifts a random selection of them up past a camera. The computer can then use that camera to look at the dice, detect what numbers have been rolled, and use that as a source of randomness. And such a machine, capable of over 1.3 random dice rolls a day, would Weigh over 100 pounds, fill a room with the cacophony of moving motors and rolling dice, and be exactly what Scott Nesson built for his Games by Email website. ScottUC runs a website where people can play games.
by email. Which means he requires about 20,000 dice rolls per day. People who play board games do take their dice rolls very seriously.
So he went to all the effort in 2009 to build a machine capable of physically rolling enough. Dice. He was sure to engineer the Diso-Matic so it was future-proof with plenty of spare capacity, hence the maximum output of over 1.3 million rolls per day. Scott currently has about a million unused dice rolls saved on his server, and the Dysomatic fires up for an hour or two each day to top off the randomness reservoir, filling his house in Texas with the thundering sound of hundreds of dice rolling at once.
However, the makers of Press Your Luck did not use that and it meant that Michael Larson was able to memorize the patterns and they ended up winning an unprecedented $110,237 On the game show, about eight times more than the average winner. He had such an extended winning streak that the normally fast turnover game show had to split his appearance across two separate episodes. And even though they did look into if he was somehow cheating or breaking the rules, eventually Michael Larson did get. All of his prize money. He managed to show that it was actually less effort to memorize the apparently random sequences than it was to memorize the trivia which the show was meant to be testing.
Michael was able to take a game show which was supposed to be skill and luck and turn it entirely into a very specific, different type of. of skill. And a great job by Robbie digging up that story, and it's just a delight. And a special thanks also to Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia. Matt's book, Humble Pie, P.I.
Pick it up at Amazon.com and the usual suspects. Michael Larson's story of how he beat the game show Press Your Luck. Here on Our American Stories. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird.
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After the big game, like most people, I kept thinking about the commercials, and there was one that stayed with me. It was from the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, and it wasn't loud or flashy. It showed a Jewish kid being targeted at school and another student who chose not to ignore it. As someone who is Jewish, that moment felt very real to me. Not dramatic, just familiar.
And what struck me was how clearly it showed that hate doesn't always announce itself, but the impact is still huge. If you saw the blue square spot during the big game, it's worth thinking about. And if you want to show support, sharing the blue square is one small way to do that. Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews. Breasts get so much attention, but they're still so ignored when it matters most.
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