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Subject to availability, see homedepot.com slash delivery for details. Sex, politics, IVF, mental illness. I bet you have rarely, if ever, heard these topics discussed in church. And I bet you've got questions about them that you'd love to ask a pastor. Well, there's a podcast that tackles these taboo topics. I'm Pastor Mike Novotny with Time of Grace Ministry and in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny, I answer questions from people just like you as I open up the Bible to give answers that point people back to the truth and especially to our Savior, Jesus.
To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. What is this place? Welcome to Cloud 9.
How exactly did I get here? You're a Toyota Crown driver and only Crown drivers ever reach this level of pure bliss. The captivating Toyota Crown family. Toyota.
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Learn more at howlifeunfolds.com slash paper terrion. And we continue here with our American stories. 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. The best TV game shows sit at the intersection of skill and luck. And in the 1980s, 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. 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. 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 pored over the footage, trying to crack if there were any underlying patterns. And sure enough, they noticed that the board only had five 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.
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. Okay, no whammies, no whammies. Come on, big bucks. I need lots of money.
Come on. And then on the next spin, $1,250 again. 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 Tamarkin, 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. 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 pore over the footage on VHS and memorize the five different cycles. But the designers of the Press Your 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.
Processes 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. The extreme version of this is to build a two 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. Scott, you see, 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 rolling enough dice. He was sure to engineer the Dice-O-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 Dice-O-Matic 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 skill. Sex, politics, IVF, mental illness. I bet you have rarely, if ever, heard these topics discussed in church and I bet you've got questions about them that you'd love to ask a pastor. Well, there's a podcast that tackles these taboo topics. I'm Pastor Mike Novotny with Time of Grace Ministry and in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny, I answer questions from people just like you as I open up the Bible to give answers that point people back to the truth and especially to our Savior Jesus.
To listen, just search Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. Hey, I'm here to tell you about Upfaith and Family, the leading streaming service for uplifting entertainment. This Christmas, cozy up with the ones you love and experience movies that not only inspire but bring people together. Enjoy Festival of Trees where holiday competition brings unexpected friendships and the heartwarming family movie, A Bluegrass Christmas, starring Shawn Johnson from the popular series, Heartland. Discover the magic of the season in Baby in a Manger, a touching story about finding hope in the most unexpected places.
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That's upfaithandfamily.com. Take a deep dive into the stories making the news headlines across the world. The News Agents. We're not just here to tell you what's happening but why from me, Emily Maitlis.
And me, John Sopel. With Global's award-winning podcast, The News Agents, dropping daily covering everything you need to know about politics and current affairs. And The News Agents USA in the race for the White House. Listening to The News Agents on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The News Agents to start listening.
