The engineer in me finds the mathematics inherent in the game interesting, while the couch potato in me finds the game boring and tediously drawn out. It’s only a one-week special, but Who Wants to be a Millionaire? started out that way too, and it spawned a regular series. I don’t think it can survive long on American TV, however.
But that’s the whole show. It’s based on suspense. Just like the Millionaire craze that thankfully was put to death soon enough.
Anyway, it is an interesting balance of variance versus expected value. I tend to keep thinking as a poker player, to maximize expected value at the cost of variance, so 90% of the offers the banker makes make me think “wtf? no way”… but again, it’s a personal decision as to what guaranteed money is worth and what you’re willing to gamble.
Still, though, pretty stupid show. If they could work trivia into it, rewarding correct answers with some sort of additional information, it might be interesting. Or something along those lines.
Woops, reading the rest of the thread, I may have just made an ass of myself. I wasn’t paying too close attention and did quick mental math to see what the expected value of the remaining chances were against the offer, and a few times, I mentally came up with the offer being significantly lower than a simple average of the rest of the cases. But I guess it’s always just an average - so I goofed. That makes it even less interesting.
Watched if for the first time tonight…mildly entertaining, but have to agree - more commercials than the results show for American Idol, and that is saying a lot.
Tonight’s show, with the black guy at the end…his brother was right…he was offered $99,000 and had a 50/50 chance of getting either $200,000 or $50. His brother said, “we can take $99,000 and turn it into $200,000, but we can’t do anything with $50.”
Luckily, the contestant listened to his brother and walked away…he would have $50 if he hadn’t.
I might watch the show again, but only if I put it on my DVR and fast forward through those 99,000 commercials.
It seems to always be less than the average, but it gets closer to the average as the game proceeds.
The black guy’s game was kind of interesting last night. I watched the last few minutes of it. He was only giving up $1000 in expected value when he took the $99K.
I guess I could see this sticking around. Looks like they’re rolling it out during a dead week, see if it gets an audience. But, what might make the show appealing is that it’s people making decisions that affect their chances to win a lot of money.
The game does move a little slow, though, and I only watched 10 minutes of it.
Oh – and wait till Samsonite decides they want to sponsor the brief cases. How much would they pay for that?
Unless I’m mistaken, they didn’t have sponsors for the cases. That astounds me.
On the expected value question - and on the assumption that it works the same as it does in Australia: the offer is not always expected value. Sometimes it’s less, sometimes a lot less, sometimes more. Although the producers won’t confirm it, a human makes the offer. It’s not automatically generated.
I have watched it once in a while here (Australia) just to check out the probabilities. It seems to me from some TV ads that players have won the absolute maximum and I don’t know how that is possible.
It ends up fun to watch because you get things like the contestant who eliminated the top 4 prizes in her first 4 picks and alternatively, I came home one night and the contestant had eliminated nearly all the left hand side and only one of the good prizes.
I caught a few minutes of it. It looked like expected value rounded off to the nearest thousand.
That’s definitely not the case in the Australian version. I’ve seen it a couple of times and calculated the expected values as the show progresses. As **hawthorne ** notes, the offer is generally not the expected value (not even if you allow for rounding to the nearer thousand).
I just played online and got down to just 2 suitcases left:
500,000 and 750,000
The banker’s offer was: $ 443,750 (huh ??)
It’s obviously not expected value.
Any conculsive evidence for how the offer is calculated ?
Wow, I’m good at that game. I just won the .01! woohoo.
I had the choice on the last two as the 1 and the .01 were left. I could have taken $.50 but no, I have real guts and went for it.
The game is interesting because of the math involved. It’s boring as heck to watch because they drag it all out, trying to make it suspenseful. Don’t think I’ll become a regular viewer.