November 7, 2024 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia, tells the story of the time Michael Larson surprisingly beat the game show, Press Your Luck, and gives a look into why computers can’t be random.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here with our American stories. And now
Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia, tells the
story of the time Michael Larson surprisingly beat the game
show Press Your Luck. Here's Matt.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The best TV game shows sit at the intersection of
skill and luck, and in the nineteen eighties there was
one such game show called Press Your Luck. The skill
component came from asking the contestants trivia questions, but then
the luck came in via the big Board. This is
(00:51):
how prizes were dished out after a contestant had demonstrated
their skill answering a trivia question.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Massive screen with a eighteen boxers detailing different cash amounts
or physical prizes, and a cartoon character known as a Whammy.
The highlight on the board would rapidly flip between the
different boxes in an apparently random order. The players would
(01:18):
then win the content of whichever box was selected when
they hit their buzzer, but if they landed on a Whammy,
the player would lose all the prizes they had accumulated
so far.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
The system would never linger on one box long enough
for the player to see what it was react, and
then hit their buzzer, and because the movement was unpredictable,
it was theoretically impossible for the player to anticipate which
box was going to be selected, so they were picking
at random and most players would win a few prizes
(02:06):
before retiring for that round. Other players, of course, would
press their luck and get whammied. I mean, that was
the idea in theory. Michael Larson was an ice cream
truck driver from Ohio, and they decided to see just
(02:28):
how random the Big Board really was. So they taped
some shows when it first started airing in nineteen eighty three,
and they poured over the footage trying to crack if
there were any underlying patterns, and sure enough, they noticed
that the board only had five predetermined cycles. They just
(02:51):
went through them so fast that they looked random. So
Michael set about memorizing those five cycles, working out exactly
when the optimum point to buzz in for each one
would be, and then they flew out to Los Angeles
and unbelievably managed to get themselves on the show as
a contestant. The game starts normally enough. Michael was competing
(03:18):
against Ed, a Baptist minister, and Janey, a dental assistant.
Michael answers enough trivia questions correctly to earn some spins
on the big board, and on his first go he
hits a whammy. By the start of the second round,
Michael is in last place, but his trivia knowledge has
just earned him seven more spins on the big board.
(03:40):
This time, he does not hit a whammy. Oh no,
He lands on one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Hey, no wammis, no wammies. Come on, big bucks, I
need lots of money. Come on, O stop, I don't
get rigados. One spin lacked.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And then on the next spin fifty dollars again.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Stop, and.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Then four thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, one thousand dollars,
a holiday, four thousand dollars, and so on. As most
of the prizes also come with a free spin, his
rain on the big board seems to be everlasting. At first,
the host, Peter Timarkin, goes through his normal patter waiting
for Michael to hit a whammy, but Michael doesn't. In
(04:31):
a freak of probability, Michael keeps selecting prize after prize.
It is amazing to watch the range of emotions the
host goes through. Initially, he's excited something unlikely is happening,
but soon he's trying to work out what on earth
is going on while still maintaining his jovial game show
(04:53):
host persona.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Cancer? Whatever? Where we stopping? Five?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Apparently, behind the scenes, chaos was breaking out as show
executives and channel directors were trying to work out was
Michael cheating? How was this happening? To their eyes, Michael
seemed to be celebrating too soon. He was pleased when
he buzzed in in less time than he conceivably could
(05:27):
have been reading the prize that he had won. Somehow,
he already knew when to press the buzzer and which
square he wanted to stop on.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if
the game show big board was actually random, then Michael
wouldn't have been able to pour over the footage on
VHS and memorize the five different cycles. But the designers
of the pressure luck system had hard coded set cycles
(05:59):
instead of making it truly random, because being random is
very difficult. There's not even really a case of it
being difficult for computers to do something randomly. It's pretty
much impossible. No computer can be random unaided. Computers are
built to follow instructions precisely. Processes are built to predictably
(06:24):
do the correct thing every time. Making computer do something
unexpected is a very difficult feat. You can't have a
line of programming code that says do something truly random
without also having a specialized component attached to the computer
to provide the randomness. The extreme version of this is
(06:49):
to build a two meter high motorized conveyor belt that
dips into a bucket of about two hundred dice and
lifts a random selection of them up past a camera.
The computer can then use that camera to look at
the dice, detect what numbers have been rolled, and use
that as a source of randomness. And such a machine,
(07:10):
capable of over one point three random dice rolls a day,
would weigh over one hundred pounds, fill a room with
the cacophony of moving motors and rolling dice, and be
exactly what Scott Nessen built for his Games by email website.
(07:30):
Scott you see runs a website where people can play
games by email, which means he requires about twenty thousand
dice rolls per day. People who play board games do
take their dice rolls very seriously, so he went to
all the effort in two thousand and nine to build
a machine capable of physically rolling enough dice. He was
(07:53):
sure to engineer the disomatic so it was future proof
with plenty of spare capacity, hence the maximum output of over
one point three million rolls per day. Scott currently has
about a million unused dice rolls saved on his server,
and the di soomatic fires up for an hour or
two each day to top off the randomness reservoir, filling
(08:16):
his house in Texas with the thundering sound of hundreds
of dice rolling at once. However, the makers of Pressure
Luck did not use that, and it meant that Michael
Larson was able to memorize the patterns, and they ended
up winning an unprecedented one hundred and ten thousand, two
(08:39):
hundred and thirty seven dollars on the game show, about
eight times more than the average winner. He had such
an extended winning streak that the normally fast turnover game
show had to split his appearance across two separate episodes,
and even though they did look into if he was
(09:02):
somehow cheating or breaking the rules, Eventually, Michael Larson did
get all of his prize money. He managed to show
that it was actually less effort to memorize the apparently
random sequences than it was to memorize the trivia which
the show was meant to be testing. Michael was able
(09:23):
to take a game show which was supposed to be
skill and luck and turn it entirely into a very
specific different type of skill.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And a great job by Robbie digging up that story,
and it's just a delight and a special thanks also
to Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia. Matt's
book Humblepie PI pick it up at Amazon dot com
and the Usual Suspects, Michael Larson's story of how he
beat the game show Press Your Luck here on our
(09:56):
American Stories
And we continue here with our American stories. And now
Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia, tells the
story of the time Michael Larson surprisingly beat the game
show Press Your Luck. Here's Matt.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The best TV game shows sit at the intersection of
skill and luck, and in the nineteen eighties there was
one such game show called Press Your Luck. The skill
component came from asking the contestants trivia questions, but then
the luck came in via the big Board. This is
(00:51):
how prizes were dished out after a contestant had demonstrated
their skill answering a trivia question.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Massive screen with a eighteen boxers detailing different cash amounts
or physical prizes, and a cartoon character known as a Whammy.
The highlight on the board would rapidly flip between the
different boxes in an apparently random order. The players would
(01:18):
then win the content of whichever box was selected when
they hit their buzzer, but if they landed on a Whammy,
the player would lose all the prizes they had accumulated
so far.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Stop.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
The system would never linger on one box long enough
for the player to see what it was react, and
then hit their buzzer, and because the movement was unpredictable,
it was theoretically impossible for the player to anticipate which
box was going to be selected, so they were picking
at random and most players would win a few prizes
(02:06):
before retiring for that round. Other players, of course, would
press their luck and get whammied. I mean, that was
the idea in theory. Michael Larson was an ice cream
truck driver from Ohio, and they decided to see just
(02:28):
how random the Big Board really was. So they taped
some shows when it first started airing in nineteen eighty three,
and they poured over the footage trying to crack if
there were any underlying patterns, and sure enough, they noticed
that the board only had five predetermined cycles. They just
(02:51):
went through them so fast that they looked random. So
Michael set about memorizing those five cycles, working out exactly
when the optimum point to buzz in for each one
would be, and then they flew out to Los Angeles
and unbelievably managed to get themselves on the show as
a contestant. The game starts normally enough. Michael was competing
(03:18):
against Ed, a Baptist minister, and Janey, a dental assistant.
Michael answers enough trivia questions correctly to earn some spins
on the big board, and on his first go he
hits a whammy. By the start of the second round,
Michael is in last place, but his trivia knowledge has
just earned him seven more spins on the big board.
(03:40):
This time, he does not hit a whammy. Oh no,
He lands on one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Hey, no wammis, no wammies. Come on, big bucks, I
need lots of money. Come on, O stop, I don't
get rigados. One spin lacked.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And then on the next spin fifty dollars again.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Stop, and.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Then four thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, one thousand dollars,
a holiday, four thousand dollars, and so on. As most
of the prizes also come with a free spin, his
rain on the big board seems to be everlasting. At first,
the host, Peter Timarkin, goes through his normal patter waiting
for Michael to hit a whammy, but Michael doesn't. In
(04:31):
a freak of probability, Michael keeps selecting prize after prize.
It is amazing to watch the range of emotions the
host goes through. Initially, he's excited something unlikely is happening,
but soon he's trying to work out what on earth
is going on while still maintaining his jovial game show
(04:53):
host persona.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Cancer? Whatever? Where we stopping? Five?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Apparently, behind the scenes, chaos was breaking out as show
executives and channel directors were trying to work out was
Michael cheating? How was this happening? To their eyes, Michael
seemed to be celebrating too soon. He was pleased when
he buzzed in in less time than he conceivably could
(05:27):
have been reading the prize that he had won. Somehow,
he already knew when to press the buzzer and which
square he wanted to stop on.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if
the game show big board was actually random, then Michael
wouldn't have been able to pour over the footage on
VHS and memorize the five different cycles. But the designers
of the pressure luck system had hard coded set cycles
(05:59):
instead of making it truly random, because being random is
very difficult. There's not even really a case of it
being difficult for computers to do something randomly. It's pretty
much impossible. No computer can be random unaided. Computers are
built to follow instructions precisely. Processes are built to predictably
(06:24):
do the correct thing every time. Making computer do something
unexpected is a very difficult feat. You can't have a
line of programming code that says do something truly random
without also having a specialized component attached to the computer
to provide the randomness. The extreme version of this is
(06:49):
to build a two meter high motorized conveyor belt that
dips into a bucket of about two hundred dice and
lifts a random selection of them up past a camera.
The computer can then use that camera to look at
the dice, detect what numbers have been rolled, and use
that as a source of randomness. And such a machine,
(07:10):
capable of over one point three random dice rolls a day,
would weigh over one hundred pounds, fill a room with
the cacophony of moving motors and rolling dice, and be
exactly what Scott Nessen built for his Games by email website.
(07:30):
Scott you see runs a website where people can play
games by email, which means he requires about twenty thousand
dice rolls per day. People who play board games do
take their dice rolls very seriously, so he went to
all the effort in two thousand and nine to build
a machine capable of physically rolling enough dice. He was
(07:53):
sure to engineer the disomatic so it was future proof
with plenty of spare capacity, hence the maximum output of over
one point three million rolls per day. Scott currently has
about a million unused dice rolls saved on his server,
and the di soomatic fires up for an hour or
two each day to top off the randomness reservoir, filling
(08:16):
his house in Texas with the thundering sound of hundreds
of dice rolling at once. However, the makers of Pressure
Luck did not use that, and it meant that Michael
Larson was able to memorize the patterns, and they ended
up winning an unprecedented one hundred and ten thousand, two
(08:39):
hundred and thirty seven dollars on the game show, about
eight times more than the average winner. He had such
an extended winning streak that the normally fast turnover game
show had to split his appearance across two separate episodes,
and even though they did look into if he was
(09:02):
somehow cheating or breaking the rules, Eventually, Michael Larson did
get all of his prize money. He managed to show
that it was actually less effort to memorize the apparently
random sequences than it was to memorize the trivia which
the show was meant to be testing. Michael was able
(09:23):
to take a game show which was supposed to be
skill and luck and turn it entirely into a very
specific different type of skill.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And a great job by Robbie digging up that story,
and it's just a delight and a special thanks also
to Matt Parker, a comedian and mathematician from Australia. Matt's
book Humblepie PI pick it up at Amazon dot com
and the Usual Suspects, Michael Larson's story of how he
beat the game show Press Your Luck here on our
(09:56):
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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