Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire?

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

by choult • 11 years ago

217 114 11 years ago

seltzered• 11 years 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/m...

Really worth the listen.

gcv• 11 years 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

knodi123• 11 years ago

that was a fun way to waste a few minutes! thanks!

murbard2• 11 years 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.

meric3• 11 years 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.

aetherson2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

gus_massa• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

tempestn7• 11 years 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.

fenomas• 11 years 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...

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years 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.

MilnerRoute3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

kragen4• 11 years 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.

Jack0002• 11 years ago

That's still a lot of bill sorting though. Not sure if you can demand sequential bills from the bank, but getting your bills pre-sorted might have been the best option, then it's just a matter of looking at the first and last bills.. Could have even just left it at the bank knowing the digit range and avoided the whole theft problem.

lectrick2• 11 years 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

devonkim2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

MilnerRoute3• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Well that blog certainly lives up to its' name! Fascinating!

Has anybody ever worked out what he did?

barbs• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

meric3• 11 years ago

An initiation ritual.

Keyframe• 11 years ago

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

cgag• 11 years ago

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

narrator2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

narrator2• 11 years 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.

littletimmy• 11 years 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.

lectrick2• 11 years ago

Really?

I think that if he was born 20 years later, he would have been a web developer. He has a knack for pattern-matching, kind of a programmer-brain feature, don't you think?

withdavidli• 11 years ago

Reminds me of this article about scratch cards and how some are not random: 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• 11 years 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=nzNMCXWCZzQ

as well as the original episode itself:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI (better quality, split into parts)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU (lower quality, whole episode)

bhandziuk• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Millionaire is a multi episode (day) process, as well

webnrrd2k• 11 years 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”.

gertef2• 11 years ago

Some of Real Genius was adapted from real pranks perpetrated at Caltech and elsewhere.

mark-r2• 11 years ago

For a long time that movie was not available on DVD. I'm glad they finally rectified that.

cgabios• 11 years ago

Voltaire would be proud [0], the dude cracked their non-CSPRNG fair and square.

0: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-wi...

hurin2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

hurin2• 11 years 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.

downandout4• 11 years 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... 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• 11 years ago

Well, a lot of those new millionaires are simply people moving from a ~$950k worth...

idlewords• 11 years ago

For most people, easy money comes from being born to rich parents.

geofft3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

downandout4• 11 years 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

Odds are odds. And I think that if people understood that they are at least 24,000 times more likely to become a millionaire by starting a business than they are by playing the lottery, they would start a business instead of playing the lottery.

moron4hire• 11 years ago

I firmly believe in breakfast any time of day

ori_b• 11 years ago

Here's another thing to keep in mind: Me losing $5 on a lottery ticket has a lot less impact on me than winning $1,000,000.

So, while the expected return is negative, it's only marginally negative. And if I do manage to win, the outcome is hugely positive.

It's not rational, sure, but it's less irrational than you make out.

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted. This is a reasonable rationale for playing the lottery.

The other positive is the entertainment in the anticipation that you may win - watching the numbers roll out.

Disclaimer: I don't play the lottery it is a waste of money.

geofft3• 11 years ago

Yup, absolutely. With a $5 investment in a lottery ticket, I can get one-in-tiny odds of becoming a millionaire in the next year as a result. With a $5 investment in starting a business, I can get absolutely, unequivocally, zero odds of becoming a millionaire in the next year as a result. If all you have to invest is $5, the lottery ticket is, sadly, a better investment.

ezzaf• 11 years ago

The outcome of winning is positive in the sense of cashflow, but the actual outcome on you is more likely to be negative:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/11/28/why-winnin...

So while not winning in the lottery might seem like a bad outcome, in fact you've avoided an even worse one. Which confoundingly means rational winnings maximization strategies (such as picking less commonly chosen numbers to reduce the odds of sharing a prize) in fact make the expected outcome of lottery playing even worse.

chimprich• 11 years ago

That report does not say how those people became millionaires. You seem to be assuming that those 600,000 millionaires became so due to working, but that figure must include people whose property value increased, inherited money, had legal payouts, or indeed won money through gambling.

Even if we assume most of those did become millionaires through "hard work", you can't say that becoming a millionaire is just down to the odds. If you already have $900,000 then your odds of becoming a millionaire next year are vastly greater than if you have $5.

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

This. On paper I'm "wealthy," mostly because of how my home has appreciated. That's very, very different than someone who has 1m in the bank as cash or sitting in investments. Selling the house isn't an option, as this is where we live, raise our kids, etc.

Most middle-class retirees are millionaires now, considering inflation and property values, not to mention how much someone with even a modest salary can squirrel away over 40 years in savings and retirement funds. The metric the parent poster used is very misleading. Personally, I don't consider someone a proper millionaire unless that value is separated from the "need to live" stuff like a house or car or retirement fund.

I think getting rich like this is pretty darn rare. I don't belittle the "gambler's approach" or the crazy business idea approach. I've seen others win before with things I considered stupid or super risky. Life is funny that way. The guys who "made it" all remind me of Michael. They just didn't screw up step 2 - go low risk after the first big win.

grkvlt• 11 years ago

Indeed. The odds of becoming a millionaire via ANY method are by definition better than the odds of becoming a millionaire by winning the lottery, since the latter is included in the former. The meaningful statistic would be obtianed by breaking down the new millionaires into categories by method of enrichment, and determining the odds of each method.

kefka3• 11 years ago

And I would love to see the chance to make $1e6 dollars per economic quintile.

I have a gut feeling that those in the bottom 40% income brackets have a much, much lower chance of making $1e6. I'm guessing that it is probably closer to that of winning the lottery.

I would like to see the numbers/proof though, to see if my hypothesis is correct.

Kesty2• 11 years ago

The problem is that, while the seconds odds are better, you need skill, time, effort, luck and, in most cases, you will have to spend more money than in a lottery (be either for investments, or studies).

The lottery odds, while a lot smaller, requires you only to invest a couple of bucks each week and to remember to check if you won.

Also there is not a formula that you can follow that will guaranteed you to become a millionaire from work/enterpreneurship and investments, while the formula for lottery winner it's quite easy. Buy a ticket.

benihana• 11 years 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

mahranch3• 11 years 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.

meric3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

the real Del Boy

gcb0• 11 years 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?

thoman232• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Counterexample: Terry Kniess

thoman232• 11 years 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.

tempestn7• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.)

georgiecasey• 11 years 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...

kragen4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

CoffeeOnWrite• 11 years ago

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

shade23• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

adam-a• 11 years ago

Seems to be down. Archive.org version from last year: http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damnint...

octatoan• 11 years ago

Doesn't work.

mazizzletizzl• 11 years 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.

MilnerRoute3• 11 years 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

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire?

Related Stories