Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)

https://www.damninteresting.com/who-wants-to-be-a-thousandaire/

by vinnyglennon • 6 years ago

185 110 6 years ago

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

Vaslo• 6 years ago

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.

skrebbel2• 6 years ago

Mad offtopic unimportant nitpick here.

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?

rriepe• 6 years ago

Articles occasionally get made into movies, and therefore have a huge incentive to be movie-like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazin...

gfxgirl• 6 years ago

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

progre• 6 years ago

I was complaining to my wife about this exact thing yesterday. Her reply: You do know we own like 20 printed cookbooks right? No ads in those...

FatalLogic2• 6 years ago

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?

dimeatree• 6 years ago

Yes. It's to the point.

skrebbel2• 6 years ago

I would prefer they at least tell us whether he cheated or got lucky. It's an awful cliffhanger that serves no purpose. This isn't a Dan Brown novel.

throwaway22452• 6 years ago

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.

anonymfus• 6 years ago

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.

ehnto3• 6 years ago

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".

kd5bjo• 6 years ago

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.

JW_00000• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism

yepthatsreality• 6 years ago

Journalism school has been removed from the equation for most American (and probably beyond those borders) bloggers.

kodt• 6 years ago

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.

DamnInteresting2• 6 years ago

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.

JKCalhoun2• 6 years ago

Thank you, author. I actually like the style - it is entertaining.

And in fact, the guys back story was almost the highlight really. Laying himself off to collect unemployment ... what a piece of work.

oneeyedpigeon• 6 years ago

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!

OscarCunningham5• 6 years ago

Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. [...] They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time

This doesn't seem possible. Surely someone who thought the way he did would have realised that you could sort the money in advance.

akdor1154• 6 years ago

   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.

mamon• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/how-...

OscarCunningham5• 6 years ago

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.

onionisafruit• 6 years ago

There’s a good chance the contest was a ruse and the disk jockey was reading a serial number off a dollar he just pulled from his wallet.

eutectic• 6 years ago

That would be illegal.

saalweachter2• 6 years ago

Oh, no. Ooooh, no.

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.

JohnJamesRambo2• 6 years ago

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.

https://www.noelwhittaker.com.au/resources/calculators/stock...

stainforth• 6 years ago

What does a dead guy do with a million dollars?

JKCalhoun2• 6 years ago

Yes, I have always ascribed to the get-rich-slow schemes and I encourage my children to do the same.

andi9993• 6 years ago

Crazies and normal people cannot predict the future.

jerf• 6 years ago

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.

raldi• 6 years ago

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.

z3t4• 6 years ago

Never underestimate sorting. Finding something in a sorted list is much faster then going through all items every time.

For example when pairing socks, first sort them by color. Or when doing hit-box-detection in xyz, first sort by one of the axis.

ryanmercer• 6 years ago

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.

jeofken• 6 years ago

Get ready for inflation to go absolutely nuts in the wake of last year.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m1

People who own (fiat) currency or have their salaries denoted in $ will face tough times - Weimar style.

spuz• 6 years ago

Could you explain how your link backs up your claim?

OscarCunningham5• 6 years ago

The graph looked like that in 2009 too, and yet inflation stayed around the 2% target.

Vinnl• 6 years ago

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...

[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...

mabbo• 6 years ago

As a non-Dutch speaker, I have to know- what was the joke?

w0utert• 6 years ago

For the second word he says 'my ex girlfriend...' and then guesses the dutch equivalent of the word 'cunt', basically.

Lio• 6 years ago

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.

kylewins2• 6 years ago

Rough Calculation:

11.7 billion one dollar bills are in circulation today

100,000 / 11,700,000,000

Every Day 1 in Million Chance of Winning

The guy was seemingly clever why not take the 5mins to find the odds or a few hours to ask the local math teacher...

hh3k0• 6 years ago

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.

kylewins2• 6 years ago

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.

Myth of sisphus

mywittyname2• 6 years ago

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.

SoSoRoCoCo3• 6 years ago

I believe the title is referencing this classic:

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/who-wants-to-b...

alisonkisk3• 6 years ago

No, both the OP and SNL are referring to "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"

SoSoRoCoCo3• 6 years ago

WWtbaM came first.

Then SNL made fun of it.

Now the OP is leveraging both with a nod.

code_duck• 6 years ago

Another discussion [2015]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570713

Found this while trying to determine the definition of "unbeardily".

flerchin• 6 years ago

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.

crazydoggers2• 6 years ago

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.

jackcosgrove• 6 years ago

Beating the system is the point of get rich quick schemes.

crazydoggers2• 6 years ago

Yeah... it’s a sad pipe dream. You’re better off producing something of value to those around you.

DonHopkins• 6 years ago

I'm working on my second million!

(...I gave up on my first.)

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

This guy would have no problem answering one specific question on the YCombinator application:

"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

<g>

Game Shows -- apparently individually constitute such (non-computer) systems... (of which "Press Your Luck" was but one example...)

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)

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