I really didn’t see anything that would suggest that the online game doesn’t use fair dice, but its very possible that I missed that information in the rules.
I ponder this because after 65+ rolls in the game I still have not created a winning “monopoly”, and after I thought about it for a while it seemed like the chances of this are fairly small. My estimates may be off but I think that with fair dice it would be around a 1 in 10,000 event to have not hit one of the winning sets in 65 rolls.
I could just be unlucky, or I may not be able to do probability or C code as well as I might think.
Board is a circle of 40 spaces, which I numbered from 0 to 39.
You move around the board by the number of spaces from a roll of 2 6 sided dice, that is from 2 to 12 spaces per move. When you land on a collectable space at the end of a move you automatically collect it.
Collecting any of the combinations below represents a “win”:
{1,3}
{6,8,9}
{11,13,14}
{16,18,19}
{21,23,24}
{26,27,29}
{31,32,34}
{37,39}
{5,15,25,35}
A bit of programming and I have a Monte Carlo run of 1000 sets of X non-winning moves, followed by exhaustive search of all combintions of the next 5 rolls and I compute
4% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 5 non-winning rolls.
17% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 10 non-winning rolls.
31% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 15 non-winning rolls.
41% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 20 non-winning rolls.
49% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 25 non-winning rolls.
54% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 30 non-winning rolls.
60% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 35 non-winning rolls.
63% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 40 non-winning rolls.
66% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 45 non-winning rolls.
67% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 50 non-winning rolls.
69% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 55 non-winning rolls.
70% chance of winning in the 5 rolls after 60 non-winning rolls.
and so forth with an average chance winning on each roll growing slowly but about 21% which seems to agree with the 67-70% chance of winning in 5 rolls.
I don’t think they use “fair” dice, either. I know about a dozen people who play it regularly every year, and of that, only 3 have won anything. 2 of the 3 won some free wi-fi time at McDonald’s. I’m assuming that’s a consolation, “keep playing, you’ll win soon!” prize. By the end of the run, everyone’s done about 100 rolls on average… and virtually nothing.
That’s pretty much it, the “dice” is actually rigged that unless you’re rolling it at the pre-seeded times taht they decided someone will win a prize at, you don’t win.
That’s a legal requirement so that they can definitely state the odds of winning, something you can’t do with a random dice roll.
(read that somewhere, either in the official rules or Wikipedia)
What? It’s incredibly easy to state the odds of winning based on a fair dice roll.
But they don’t want the actual odds to be as good as they appear; otherwise they’d have to pay too much in prizes. So the dice are ‘fixed’, although I’m sure the fine print in the rules gives the real odds.
Yeah, but it doesn’t work out the way that McDonald’s (and, possibly, the regulations on contests like this) want. If you use fair dice, you might have 3 winners one year and several years with no big winners. That fits the mathematical definition of “odds of winning”, but it doesn’t correspond to how people expect contests will be run.
Just an explanation: random numbers on the computer are generated with pseudo-random algorithm - which is basically a complex math formula which use some prime numbers and manipulate them using the modulus math function. The function needs input to work, and given a number, the function would always spit out the same sequence of numbers. Hence usually the date and time (down to the millisecond) are use for the ‘input’, hence seeding.
So this is how to use certain date/time or certain ‘seed numbers’ to hold the sequence to winning.
It is ‘fixed’ in sense. As in, your fate is predetermined.
No it doesn’t. Most online sweepstakes work on the principle that before the contest even starts, the computer randomly generates a bunch of times that trigger instant wins. The first person to play after that triggered time is the winner. I’m sure the McDonald’s game uses some kind of variant for that.
But no, it obviously doesn’t use fair dice. I’ve been around the board several times and I only land on properties I already own or random spaces that don’t give you anything. If it truly used random dice, they wouldn’t be able to predict how many winners they would have, but since they already know the number of prizes they’re going to give out, I’d have to say that’s the evidence for the game not using fair dice.
I had thought the rules defined landing on the winning combination as only a chance to win, with the final determination of winning based on whether the prize had already been won in the time slot allocated to it. Based on that caveat in the rules it seems easy to have fair dice and still have controlled payout.
Based on playing for a bit and those estimates of the odds of landing on the combinations, it does seem they removed the chance that you could land on the winning combinations except when they were available.
Takes longer for people to recognize the dice aren’t fair than it would if landing on the winning item wasn’t really a win. Thus they can string folks along longer, and I fell for it… /sigh