Pressing Your Luck

Greetings,

This thread is for discussion relating to my recent article about the, "Press Your Luck Scandal," having to do with Michael Larson beating the game show via an exploit in the 80's:

https://wizardofvegas.com/articles/pressing-your-luck/

It's really tough to go into any great detail on it without writing the article all over again as a thread, but the cliff notes version is that the Peter Tomarken hosted game show thought to be random was anything but and a man named Michael Larson found a way to beat the game.

This seemed like the most appropriate sub-topic, so I put it here.

I would probably have to recommend reading the full article on this one if you're not familiar with the story, but if you are, I'd love to hear your thoughts regardless of whether or not you choose to read the article.

There's nothing really serious about this poll at all, and multiple options can be chosen.

The thing that bothers me most is that Larson is often mentioned on, "Game Show Cheaters," lists in the context of cheating, but he most certainly did not. Even the Executive Producers agreed that learning the patterns of the Big Board did not violate any rules.

I didn't mention it in the article, but it does make me wonder why so many people are hard-wired to assume that any unusual means to beat something should constitute, "Cheating." That seems like the same sort of mentality that leads so many to believe that card-counting at BJ, just for one example, is cheating.

Pattern recognition? I should hope so.

A necessary skill for spotting predators as well as prey hiding in foliage. Swallow an insect that makes you sick and you had better remember its peculiar markings. A male bird sings a mating song once, but its a complex song that demonstrates his memory skills to make him attractive to a female that will select him.

All life is pattern recognition.

Those are excellent thoughts, and I think that's really the great rub of it!

There's something of a fine line between pattern recognition and making erroneous assumptions based on correlation and limited sample size. System bettors and believers do the latter, of course. Another example using your insect would be swallowing that one as opposed to a harmless one with similar markings.

I guess that's the lesson: Adeptness at recognizing patterns can bear great rewards while erroneousness and false recognition can result in potentially tragic outcomes. Survival of the fittest, and all that.

Quote: Mission146

.... I didn't mention it in the article, but it does make me wonder why so many people are hard-wired to assume that any unusual means to beat something should constitute, "Cheating." That seems like the same sort of mentality that leads so many to believe that card-counting at BJ, just for one example, is cheating.

It was similar to card counting in that it was not in the intended method of play.

Cheating? Nope.

But it could get you barred.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

It was similar to card counting in that it was not in the intended method of play.

Cheating? Nope.

But it could get you barred.

The responsibility of keeping games from being played in unintended ways lays with the game designers , casino management , game show producers etc .. not with the players. If a game can be played and systemically beaten , then that’s a flaw in the game

Quote: DJTeddyBear

It was similar to card counting in that it was not in the intended method of play.

Cheating? Nope.

But it could get you barred.

How not? You have a buzzer, you hit the buzzer, and then the board stops. The object is to stop the board on the desired square, which is what he did. I say the difference between the Execs and the casinos is that the Execs simply recognized that they had offered a beatable proposition and were willing to eat their loses without a fight.

Quote: michael99000

The responsibility of keeping games from being played in unintended ways lays with the game designers , casino management , game show producers etc .. not with the players. If a game can be played and systemically beaten , then that’s a flaw in the game

Exactly, and the Executive Producers essentially stated that they simply didn't think anyone would figure out the pattern, let alone figure out that there even was a pattern that could be figured out.

Mission -

I had heard the story before now, but read your article after voting and posting above.

Excellent write up.

But one thing I didn’t see was, what happened on his second day on the show?

DJTeddyBear,

Thanks for the compliment!

His two days on the show were all essentially that one day. They did a split episode for the first time ever because a half hour wasn't long enough to contain everything.

If you mean what happened when he returned, the answer is he could not return. Even prior to Larson's game, CBS had a rule in place that no one person could return if his or her prize winnings on a specific show exceeded $25,000. You could win more than $25,000 and you would get it all, but you could not return if your total winnings (or winnings in one day) exceeded 25k. Ken Jennings would have been heartbroken.

Quote: Mission146

There's something of a fine line between pattern recognition and making erroneous assumptions based on correlation and limited sample size..

Yes, and that is one trouble with Artificial Intelligence: Overfitting. One develops algorithms based on a defined set of data and then turn it loose in the real world and its an utter failure. Similar to the FBI's database on child molesters in prisons. You interview perverts and drug addicts and desperately poor people and then the perceived rules loose on normal people that include ordinary parents whose kids have indeed been kidnapped. Or you develop rules that deny bail to those with geographic instability but forget to make an exception for a US Navy parachute rigger whose geographic instability is not his fault but Uncle Sam's fault.

The famed case of a computer that people thought had learned to differentiate between obvious tanks and camouflaged tanks but had actually only learned to differentiate between photos taken on a sunny day and photos taken on a cloudy day.

Or the man who spend several years ordering small frogs legs in restaurants based on his experience of his first two meals of frog legs. Later he learned that the first meal of large frog legs he had eaten has simply not been fresh frogs legs. He had done feature extraction but it was the wrong feature.

Pattern recognition is fine, but dangerous.