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...
> 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.
So, thinking about how you would run this contest, you've got three basic ways of generating a random serial number.
The first is literally generating a random serial number; the problem being, there is an infinitesimal chance the serial number you just generated is in the pocket of someone in your listening area.
The second is to choose a sibling serial number of a bill in your pocket -- change one of the last couple of digits. If you're lucky, the sibling bills will have been delivered to the same bank in the same area and still be in circulation. But there's still a pretty slim chance it's even possible.
The best way to ensure that your contest is actually winnable, that your target bill is in circulation would be to start the contest by taking all the bills from your collective pockets, at the studio, writing down the serial numbers, and then handing them to someone to go buy coffee for the studio across the street. Wait a week or two, and your target bills will have circulated through the area enough, but almost certainly be in the pockets of people who could tune in and listen, and not someone halfway across the country.
So enter the 100,000 $1 bills sitting in stacks in this dude's house. Not circulating. At first, this isn't a problem -- he took out the bills after the contest start, after all -- but as time goes on, and the studio repeats the process of tagging and releasing new bills in circulation to generate new numbers to call out, suddenly, there is no chance that any of these hundred-thousand bills you are laboriously checking will work.
I worked at a small company for a short period of time where we would run a "contest" on social media, but then our social media guy would just comb through the entries and find someone attractive, in the right demo, and very active on social media and just give them the prize as a way to generate more social media buzz.
Back when the mafia used to have their own lottery (aka "the numbers"), there were two ways to pick the winning number (usually between 1 and 100).
Option 1:
Use the last two digits of some commonly available public number that was, essentially, random or at least unpredictable and not controllable. A good example today would be the cents portion of the SP500 index.
Options 2:
Tally up which of the numbers had the least amount of money bet on it and then make that the number.
You can guess which of the two options the more nefarious organizations used.
Interesting related note: back in the first half of the 20th century, there used to be a game in the newspapers where you were presented with a grid of faces, each one being numbered. The goal was to pick the face that you though OTHER people would pick most often. In other words, if you picked the most popular face, you would win. This led to lots of "well which face do I think other people will think is most popular etc"
John Maynard Keynes used the game above as a proxy for the stock market with stocks being the faces e.g. you were trying to pick the stock you thought that everyone else would buy.
In a past life I worked at a marketing agency. When we'd run random drawings, I'd (properly) randomly select and provide a winner.
It happened more than once that the marketing side would come back and ask for a new winner because of a situation like us doing a drawing for a prize from an ISP, and the winner's email being "@competitorisp.net".
As far as I know (and I've got a reasonable basis for this), the clients never requested this or anything. It was purely our marketing guys not liking the optics of telling the client that a competitor's customer won.
And yeah, for some giveaways and stuff they'd take a list of people and trawl through their social media accounts to figure out who'd have the most impact.
Again, don't think the clients had requested this, it just made the job we're doing look better to show the client "Yeah this person won and look at all the social media buzz it created!" rather than "Yeah we gave it to someone that looks like a troll, has no media presence, and the only people that will probably hear about this are a few people in an IRC chatroom."
If it's not regulated (or small enough that the regulators won't notice), I'd assume any contest/etc like this is probably rigged. Marketing is, generally, an industry full of lies. The contests are no different.
I worked next desk to a bunch of social media marketers, and then dealt with some individual social media marketers later on. My entire experience makes me immediately distrust anything such a person says. The only thing you can trust is that they'll do the thing that creates most engagement.
> The best way to ensure that your contest is actually winnable
This is definitely not a requirement according to some business owners. No shortage of faux competitions used to generate email signups around, even from reputable companies.
Closely related to this is the now accepted business practice of creating fake product offers to simultaneously gauge interest and collect e-mail addresses - where the actual product doesn't exist and only, maybe, will be developed if the scam generates good enough result.
Bonus points for using this to generate evidence for VCs you're courting.
Even if they physically had the bill and ensured it was in circulation in the city, the chances that someone has it and is listening to that radio station is so small. The radio station had to know it was an unwinnable contest. Why anyone would think they could win the contest is beyond me!
I don't know enough about this particular contest -- and since it happened in 1984, I'm not going to attempt to find more information on the internet -- but typically the goal isn't to have an unwinnable contest, just to have it drag on long enough while drawing more and more people into listening.
At the start of the contest, you might have 0.1% of the people in your listening area tuning in for the reading of the serial number, and by the end, 1-5%, before dropping down to, say, 0.2-0.5% after the contest is over. Early on, there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone listening having the bill, more or less, so the contest won't end too early, but by the end, you are up to a 1-in-20 chance, so once it gets popular enough, it will end fast enough that people don't get too much into grumbling that your contest is rigged.
Meanwhile, the radio station probably didn't actually put up the $30,000 -- it was probably an advertiser who paid the radio station $40,000 out of their advertising budget to run the contest, or should I say, the Wonder Widget's daily drawing, brought to you by Wonder Widgets, your wonderful source of wonderful widgets. You repeat the advertiser's slogan three or four times as people are tuning in to the station to listen for the day's serial number, and three or four more times throughout the day reminding people to tune in at X o'clock.
There's no need for the contest to be rigged or unwinnable -- it's a bargain for everyone at half the price. The advertiser knows people are listening to their ads, the radio station is getting paid outright as well as getting a boost in their listeners (which gets them more money from other advertisers). And actually paying out the money, eventually, lets you go back to that same gold mine again and again.
I totally agree, you want a hard to win contest so more and more people tune in. But I think you want...need... a winner. The radio station and the advertiser want a picture in the newspaper with someone holding a $30,000 cheque, you want that person screaming on the radio when they win. You want interviews with that person talking about how they will spend their winnings. A contest without a winner would be a terrible thing for everyone involved, well I guess for the ad agency putting in $30,000, maybe they get their money back?
This all reminds me of the lengths I went to a few years ago. An admin assistant in my office was really into these contests. She would listen to all the various stations and call in. There was a contest that was "identify this song" and everyday it went unguessed, they would add to the pot. It was getting up to $20,000 or something and no one could guess. I ended up downloading the clip and putting it through various Shazam like programs trying to help identify it. Never did win, but it was exciting for a short time. If after 30 days, they had just said, no one wins, I would have been pretty erked.
One 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Back 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.
> 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.
I'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.
> 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
Most 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.
This 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.
You 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.
Maybe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I wouldn't say it looked similar... The time scales are different for the same _relative_ amount printed. 2009 took longer to play out. We're not even 1 year in.
Yeah, you're right. A good way to compare the relative increases is to go to 'Edit Graph' and set a log scale in the 'Format' tab. That makes it clear the relative change in 2020 was huge.
I'm still not sure it will cause inflation though, since COVID has had a big deflationary impact and the Fed can always unwind if needed.
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.
Neutral money is the spherical cow of economics, and it isn't correct. You need to take into effect the Cantillion effect. The only way we would getting meaningful CPI inflation is if the new money was going to people who would increase their demand of CPI items if they got it. This year the FED has bought bonds, and so that is who that money was given to people with those bonds. Those people can then spend that money, but as we've seen with the stock market, that money was just pumped into the stock market. So all we will see is that the velocity of money will drop further, the prices of items tracked by the CPI won't move, and wealth inequality just got a little worse.
The comment applies to both paper and M1. It also applies to M3, although M3 is already way too broad for any useful inflation number, it is also too restrictive in different ways.
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.
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.
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?
Author of the article here. It's definitely not about ads. On principle, we don't host ads on Damn Interesting, and we never have.
We aim for narrative non-fiction, to tell a true story that keeps the reader intrigued throughout. We've found over the years that stories with a good "hook" or "teaser" seem to be best received by readers. We've also found that people want some background on the people/places they are reading about, and this often requires us to jump back in time after the teaser to fill in the relevant information.
If your goal is just to extract the basic bones of the story rather than to be entertained for a while, you probably won't like this article, nor the others in our catalog. Our approach to storytelling is not for everybody. And that's okay with us--trying to please everyone is the short road to clickbait town.
FWIW, I thought it was a highly entertaining read and well written. This style of introduction followed by a 'rewind to the beginning' is pretty common in my experience, particularly in magazine articles including longform newspaper pieces, here in the UK. I don't know why anyone would associate it with clickbait - I find that strange.
If I were being hyper critical, I'd suggest maybe some kind of visual section break, like one of those stylised wavy lines - I have no idea what they're called!
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?
The simplest solution favoured by European magazines and newspapers is to put factoids away from the main body of the article. They can be put into separate text boxes, or added to illustration descriptions. The laziest illustration would be a photo of some generic landmark view from that town, but they can also try to find a photo of his school (there are about five schools in that Lebanon, right?), for example. Notice that they already have a photo with his girlfriend with a single sentence description, they could move a half of tangent about his personal life in it.
The harder solution is to try to find a context which will make that factoid more interesting. For example, "Shaker Curse". Imagine an article telling you that everybody born there is cursed to never prosper, and now your mind is wondering, did Michael Larson broke the alleged curse, or affirmed it?
The hardest solution I had seen was an entire separate encyclopedia with biographies of people mentioned in the news crosslinked with a news article.
I don't know where (for example) Mark Zuckerberg was born, nor when, and nor do I care.
I know the parts which are relevant to Zuckerberg's story: that he was likely born in the US, and was likely around 20 when he founded Facebook.
A journalistic interpretation of Larson's childhood is speculative non-sense. The journalist was not there, and does not even cite who thought Larson was "creative and intelligent".
It doesn't add anything (for me), except that the journalist presenting themself as an omniscient narrator makes the article read as a fictional story.
Zuckerberg was a child of privilege raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the US and attended an extremely elite private high school. That's relevant.
Absolutely. Part of that sentence is quite captivating "he had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful employment". You've piqued my interest, and now I actually care to investigate how this story might unfold.
I think the grandparent is talking about the tendency for writers to show all their cards in scene one and then retract them, saying "Aha! Got your attention, now instead of what I was previously describing, here's some mindless filler".
This seems to be a typical feature of "long-form journalism" [1]. This might be a typically American format? (As a Belgian, I also see this type of articles less often in our media.) I've grown to dislike it because it feels pseudo-intellectual: making articles longer with the implication that they must be of higher quality (especially in contrast to clickbait), but in reality, it often feels like the journalist is just fluffing up the text with irrelevant information. I think these articles are supposed to be read like a short story, but nonfictional, rather than as a factual account of what happened.
From what I can tell, the problem is that those first three paragraphs are a perfectly good introduction to a different article. Larson is obviously going to be a main character in this story, but there are strong signals that the article won't be primarily about Larson. Instead, it seems to be building up to a story about how the show went wrong and what the wider effects were. In particular, it's promising themes of themes of shock and incredulity.
The next four paragraphs deliver none of this, opting instead to make a study of Larson's character. The show itself, another major character, doesn't makes an appearance again until paragraph 8. The first hint at the foreshadowed themes doesn't show up until the end of paragraph 10, where "Bob Edwards was uneasy about Larson." and then not again until paragraph 14, where "Host Peter Tomarken became increasingly flabbergasted..."
From that point on, the article seems to match the tone of the introduction. The correct fix is probably to rework the introduction to include some of the themes present in the first half of the article. Maybe focus on themes of escalation, as the whole article is built as a slow, constant build-up of intensity.
This format is very common in long form journalism. New Yorker articles are a good example of this format.
First they have the hook, then they go back and tell the persons entire life story. I think the point is for you to get somewhat emotionally invested in the story, almost like reading a novel or short story instead of just reporting the facts.
Some people find it more enjoyable to read, or may find it easier to retain information in this format as you begin to get invested in the story.
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
[1] https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow or Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312
[2] https://www.nu.nl/media/6099564/andries-tunru-evenaart-recor...