> Recent Entries
> Archive
> Friends
> User Info

November 15th, 2006

05:12 pm - It's The Big One! If you can recognise which of the many people who have doubtless said "It's The Big One!" over the years I like to quote, award yourself considerable smugness. The EuroMillions lottery draw rolled over for an eleventh consecutive week last week, so a special stipulation comes into play. It cannot roll over for a twelfth consecutive week, so all the rollover funds are guaranteed to be paid out this week. If there's no jackpot winner this time, the rollover fund will be split among the winners of the second prize. This means that there may very well be a situation where more is paid out in prize money this week than is taken in from entry funds. If that wouldn't be a good reason to play the lottery, I don't know what would be. Of course, the chance that you'll lose is as just high as ever, and if you win one of the smaller prizes, your smaller prize is going to be about the same as usual; it's just that in the unlikely but nevertheless possible incident that you hit the top prize awarded, which does not necessarily have to be the jackpot, then it'll be much higher than usual - and that makes the lottery more worthwhile playing. ( In short, you should buy a EuroMillions ticket as long as the estimated jackpot doesn't reach £124,000,000. ) ETA: Didn't win the jackpot. In fact, nobody did. As hinted at in 2) above, 20 people each won the 5+1 prize, which worked out at around £6½ million or €9.65 million each, which is a pretty handsome chunk o' change. Happily, 7 of these 20 winning tickets were British, though only something like 15%-25% of the entries normally are. (Apparently this time we bought second most tickets behind only France, and France only had 4 big winners to our 7. Hurrah!) I think my assumptions about exchange rates may have been a simplification too far. The number of tickets bought was probably between 120,506,199 and 134,293,684 and the jackpot pool ended up being £123,232,395, which (if anything) looks a little low. Hopefully more detailed figures released in coming days - possibly requiring a country-by-country breakdown, alas - will permit more detailed analysis. Current Mood: geeky Tags: gambling, games, lottery, mathematics, probability

(27 comments | Leave a comment)

December 24th, 2005

03:38 am - Deal or No Deal "Deal Or No Deal" is the most interesting new game show we've had for a while in the UK. It's a format that has been used in countries on at least four continents, as lovingly compared and contrasted by brigbother. After months of speculation, Britain finally has its own version, stripped across the Channel 4 schedules from Monday to Saturday at 4:15pm. It also represents Noel Edmonds' return to TV, after the wheels fell off Noel's House Party years ago. I half-wrote this in early November and then let it go for weeks; as the US is having their version at the moment, this strikes me as the appropriate inspiration to finish the job off while it's at all relevant. It's a fairly dumb show; at heart, it's Let's Make A Deal writ large. (UK readers, Take Your Pick writ large is even more accurate. Someone made that comparison before me and I can't remember who.) Nevertheless, there's something to it; it poses a few interesting questions about people's attitudes and expectations pertaining to winning. In short, a contestant is selected and wins a sum of money (in general). They have no control over how much; they have very little idea as to how much at the beginning, but during the show, they get more information. They are given six opportunities to swap their unknown prize for a known sum of cash, based on what the information is; by the end, it's heads-or-tails as to whether the sum of money is one known value or another known value. If they accept a known sum of cash, they win that much; if they reject all six offers, they win their original sum. Er, that's it. It's the Crazy Frog of game shows. ( There are still some interesting questions it raises, though. Deal or No Deal deconstructed in a poll and 6,000+ words. ) Current Mood: tired Current Music: Katamari Damacy soundtrack Tags: economics, game shows, games, mathematics, moose, probability

(26 comments | Leave a comment)