As does my housemate Cerridwyn.
Yes, more frequently than one might expect. Bob typically pointed out why it’s such a bad idea after reading the actual price but there was one recent instance on the TPIR Roku channel when he didn’t. I guess he was pressed for time.
BobLibDem gives a link to that happening. The guy actually won!
There’s a game called “Cover Up” where you have to guess the price of a car. You have two possible numbers for the first digit, three possibilities for the second digit, etc. You guess a price, and as long as one of the numbers is right, you get another guess.
I found this example:
Seems to me that everybody plays it wrong. You want to have as many guesses as possible, so you want only one correct number each time. In the video, she gets the second and third digits right on her second guess. One her next guess, her chances are 1/3 and 1/4. If she’d gotten the third digit wrong, her chances would be 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4.
Do you remember Bart’s incantation to raise the dead on The Simpsons?
“Cullen, Rayburn, Narz, Trebek!”
Ha, no I just have missed that one.
But in my experience, Joe Garagiola was a game show host. Later I learned he did some other things, too.
Your strategy amounts to picking numbers that you know are wrong, so you can eliminate them from your future guesses. But if you already know they’re wrong, you can eliminate them from your future guesses anyway.
In this example, I guess she could have known (if she’s quite knowledgeable about car prices) that the second digit couldn’t be 9 or 7. But the rest is a crapshoot. How would you deliberately pick wrong numbers for the last three digits?
If she deliberately picked the wrong first two digits (say by knowing that the price couldn’t be over $25,000) then she’s taking the chance of getting eliminated on that turn. You want to pick exactly one more correct number per turn, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that reliably or even to improve your chances of doing that.
You can make educated guesses on the first three digits; the last two are pretty much a crap shoot.
Watch the video. When the contestant makes her second guess, and gets two more digits correct ($209XX), she looks happy. She’d have been better off to get the third digit wrong ($20XXX). She couldn’t have known for sure that the 9 was correct, but I get the impression she hoped it was.
Yes, if you knew for sure what numbers were wrong, then you could just guess the right numbers and win. I still think you can try to hold back your guesses on the first few digits to give yourself as many chances as possible.
I wonder if anybody has ever won that game in the way I’m suggesting; taking five guesses and getting the digits from left to right.
Yeah, I think I’d do that almost every time.