Deal or No Deal: A Statistical Deal. Deal or No Deal is clearly America’s newest game show fetish. Hell, if it can bring Howie Mandel back from the throes of irrelevance, then it’s obviously captured the fascination of the public. Regardless, I have to add my name to the list of people who are hooked on this new TV chew toy, but I’m convinced that my love for the show is reflective of some kind of masochistic tendencies that I must be suppressing. Let’s face it: it’s pure agony watching someone turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars in hopes that they’ll make more, only to watch them get burned in the end and settle for far less than the amount that they already turned down. Despite that, playing the risk/reward game with such large sums of money is enough to catch anybody’s attention, and I think people in general are attracted to games of this nature (Vegas, anyone?). Last night’s show was extremely interesting because one of the contestants appeared to make the biggest bonehead move imagineable given her situation. The game of Deal or No Deal is a series of choices. The first choice (besides a random choice of case). Deal or No Deal - Secret EXPOSED!!! Proof Stacker is Rigged! Cut the Rope Arcade Game - First WIN! I was a game technician at the biggest family arcade in my. You know that arcade game where you drop your coin into it and it. Anyway it is probably the top rating game show on TV here which is. It's not rigged- it's just the odds. Here was her scenario: She had 5 suitcases left that contained the following amounts: $1. Deal or no deal, miss thang? Unbelievably (to me, at least), this dumb woman, at the behest of her equally dumb husband, uttered the words the audience was just dying to hear: no deal. In a beautifully ironic fashion, the very next suitcase she opened contained $3. And of course, the audience offered up the oh- so- sympathetic and stereotypical “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”Don’t get me started on the studio audience! Drink!” while some socially inept reject tries to pour as much beer down his gullet as possible in order to attain five minutes of superstar status. A closer look at the game within the game. Deal or No Deal is the name of. Innovative Concepts in Entertainment developed and currently sells an arcade. The Deal or No Deal television game. While watching last night’s show, I had this intrinsic feeling that the woman just made a hideous decision, but at the time, I hadn’t come up with a mathematical reasoning to back my feelings. It was one of those gut instinct things that you just kind of know? This morning, however, I figured I may as well look into the math a little more just to see if I was correct in my opinion. Oh, and I sincerely hope that one of you make it on the show someday so that you can use my “Deal or No Deal Strategy Guide” to your advantage. Anyway, on with the numbers. Then again, you always have the banker in there as the x- factor, so that argument represents a worst case scenario. For me, this isn’t quite exacting enough, so now we need to look for a more defined strategy. Enter probability theory, and more specifically, the value that you can expect to earn based on the number of remaining suitcases and their associated dollar amounts. Not surprisingly, this is astutely named – wait for it – the expected value. At the beginning of Deal or No Deal, the contestant is presented with 2. If no cases have been opened, then this value computes to approximately $1. You mathematicians out there will already have noticed that the expected value for Deal or No Deal is simply the arithmetic mean, or more simply, the average dollar amount remaining in the cases. Risk aside, accepting a “deal” for less than the mean should generally be regarded as a gutless, weak decision, and the contestant should be ridiculed accordingly. However, late in the game, if a savvy contestant were to wrangle an amount out of the banker that is greater than the mean, then he or she ought to be carted off stage like Mike Ditka after the ’8.
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November 2016
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