TTD Beat the Dragon and S and P question

[ttdrules]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'178128\' date=\'Feb 18 2008, 11:52 AM\']
[quote name=\'Modor\' post=\'178127\' date=\'Feb 18 2008, 11:38 AM\']
[quote name=\'lobster\' post=\'178115\' date=\'Feb 18 2008, 12:52 PM\']Whenever someone called a 6 I would always wonder "does this guy ever watch the show?!"[/quote]Well, if the contestants were under the assumption that it was randomly picked, they wouldn't have any reason not to pick 6, now would they?
[/quote]
"The price ALWAYS ends in 7! Always always always! How stupid can they be?"
[/quote]


The dragon has been behind 6 alot lately.  Before that it seemed to only come up behind 2, 5 or 9.  So far this season it has only been behind #1 once, #7 three times (consecutively I might add)  and #4 three times if memory serves me right.  #3 has also been pretty safe.  I only remember the dragon coming up behind 3 once or twice since TTD came back to GSN.

Bottom line is I would never pick 2,5,6 or 9 if I was on TTD back then.

[Kevin Prather]

[quote name=\'ttdrules\' post=\'178136\' date=\'Feb 18 2008, 12:58 PM\']
The dragon has been behind 6 alot lately.  Before that it seemed to only come up behind 2, 5 or 9.  So far this season it has only been behind #1 once, #7 three times (consecutively I might add)  and #4 three times if memory serves me right.  #3 has also been pretty safe.  I only remember the dragon coming up behind 3 once or twice since TTD came back to GSN.

Bottom line is I would never pick 2,5,6 or 9 if I was on TTD back then.
[/quote]
http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/9759/picardbv6rw9.jpg

[Don Howard]

[quote name=\'lobster\' post=\'178115\' date=\'Feb 18 2008, 12:52 PM\']
Whenever someone called a 6 I would always wonder "does this guy ever watch the show?!"[/quote]
Then include me among the dense because I watched nearly every night for the three years it was on TV-5
in Cleveland (1978-81; weeknights at 7:30) and never made that connection.

[lobster]

y'alls is so funny

I guess I should have thrown in the fact that I was eight years old.. so, of course, mindless number-picking games were a fascination... but as for the 6, perhaps one day a hardcore TTD fan will reveal the stats and prove I wasn't taking one too many flintstone vitamin..

[RobRosko]

On a somewhat related note of patterns and questionable random actions, it seems as if the main game categories failed to shuffle on several occasions.  Weeks ago, when Tom Parrish (I seem to recall he was on TJW, as well) was in the challenger's position, the board went several turns without moving the categories.  During one of Wink's "take a look at those 3 boxes, currently with X, Y, and Z, as we shuffle them around..." deals, Tom even commented after the "shuffle" that they were "very much the same".

Tom's incident was the first that I had noticed this, but it has since happened a few more times, often just for one turn.  I dismiss the possibility that the categories were just randomly placed back into their original boxes - it's highly unlikely to happen that many times in a row.  I don't want to say it's "unfair" that the categories didn't shuffle for the players, but if one person gets a shuffled board, doesn't it seem right that the other player get the same benefit?

-Rob

[mmb5]

[quote name=\'RobRosko\' post=\'178198\' date=\'Feb 19 2008, 10:04 AM\']
On a somewhat related note of patterns and questionable random actions, it seems as if the main game categories failed to shuffle on several occasions.  Weeks ago, when Tom Parrish (I seem to recall he was on TJW, as well) was in the challenger's position, the board went several turns without moving the categories.  During one of Wink's "take a look at those 3 boxes, currently with X, Y, and Z, as we shuffle them around..." deals, Tom even commented after the "shuffle" that they were "very much the same".
[/quote]
With three boxes left, there's going to be a 1-in-8 chance that they will shuffle back to their original positions, if they stuck with a contrivance that the three visible categories will remain the three visible categories post-shuffle.

At the Congress that had the live Tic-Tac-Dough, we had a fun little incident where "The Beatles" were the same category four times in a row, basically because that category ended up in the next logical spot to be played.  And I can assure you..the placement was meant to be random.

I'm not that familiar with the randomness of Apple ][ generated random numbers, but if they were anything like  their 8-bit cousins, it was a rather finite set.  I'm just amazed that they stuck with a tape drive to load the software all those years.


--Mike

[TraderRob]

Because I know y'all wanted to know.  I am missing one bonus round from Episode B-015.

Through the 2/18 show, the bonus round has been played 46 times.  Below is the frequency of the dragon:

#1 - 1
#2 - 9
#3 - 1
#4 - 5
#5 - 9
#6 - 7
#7 - 4
#8 - 1
#9 - 8
unknown - 1

One thing I will mention, for the first 23 playings, the dragon was confined to either 2, 4, 5, 7 or 9 (unless there was an exception in that episode I missed).  Admittedly, it has come up in #6 somewhat frequently in recent days, but I'm sure the distribution will all balance out at some point.  

It's also been kinda fun watching the way the categories are put together.  Aquatic Biology only seems to first appear in the upper left, Potluck Pix comes up way more than any other category, and "Evil People?"  "The Odd One?"  And what really is the difference between "Mixed Words" and "Jumbled Words?" :-)

Rob

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'TraderRob\' post=\'178223\' date=\'Feb 19 2008, 01:32 PM\']
Through the 2/18 show, the bonus round has been played 46 times.  Below is the frequency of the dragon:

#1 - 1
#2 - 9
#3 - 1
#4 - 5
#5 - 9
#6 - 7
#7 - 4
#8 - 1
#9 - 8
unknown - 1
[/quote]
That's an interesting spread. I would be really interested to see how it compares to the same spread after 100 plays. If it's still heavy towards #2, #5 #6, and #9 at that point I'd say we definitely have something here.

[Marc412]

It's also been kinda fun watching the way the categories are put together.  Aquatic Biology only seems to first appear in the upper left, Potluck Pix comes up way more than any other category, and "Evil People?"  "The Odd One?"  And what really is the difference between "Mixed Words" and "Jumbled Words?" :-)

There is none, AFAIK.  There have also been other largely equivalent Tic-Tac-Dough categories:  
"Good Guys" = "Heroes"
"Bad Guys" = "Evil People" = "Villains"
"Clothes Styles" = "Fashion(s)"
"One Word Names" = "One Word Titles"
"Odd Names" = "Strange Names"
"Strange Facts" = "Oddities"
"Animals" = "Zoology"

Another bit of evidence as to the limitations of the Apple II is that Wink's podium (which you can see when he reads off the categories on the board at the start of each game) has nine stacks of blue cards (for the ordinary questions) but only eight stacks of pink ones (for the two-parters).  That means one of the categories won't appear in the center box.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Marc412\' post=\'178233\' date=\'Feb 19 2008, 02:38 PM\']
Another bit of evidence as to the limitations of the Apple II is that Wink's podium (which you can see when he reads off the categories on the board at the start of each game) has nine stacks of blue cards (for the ordinary questions) but only eight stacks of pink ones (for the two-parters).  That means one of the categories won't appear in the center box.
[/quote]
Except that has nothing to do with any limitations of the computer(s) itself, and I have no idea at all why the software wouldn't be able to do that. I don't know why that decision was made, but I have to think it was a conscious one.

[Sodboy13]

Could it be that one category had questions which were adaptable as one- or two-parters?  I've noticed a fair number of questions where Wink will go in the direction of two potential answers, and then add "name one" at the end.  I've also seen questions that point to things like both an actor and a film, and Wink then proceeds to ask the contestant to name only one or the other.

Also, it's interesting to read that I'm not the only elementary school kid who thought the dragon spent a good portion of his time behind box 6.

[MSTieScott]

Random thought (I don't get GSN, so I haven't seen any of these episodes) -- has a visual aid category been in the center box? Maybe they didn't want to worry about activating the correct slide projector based on which type of question was about to be read?

--
Scott Robinson

[TraderRob]

[quote name=\'MSTieScott\' post=\'178265\' date=\'Feb 19 2008, 10:43 PM\']
Random thought (I don't get GSN, so I haven't seen any of these episodes) -- has a visual aid category been in the center box? Maybe they didn't want to worry about activating the correct slide projector based on which type of question was about to be read?

--
Scott Robinson
[/quote]

No, there have been visual categories in the center box.  One I remember was a picture of two actors and the contestant was asked to name them both.  Same with Symbols.  The screen displayed two symbols.

[visualbasicwizard]

I would think that after they'd introduced the "red categories", that they'd keep them from appearing in the center box.  That could get messy having one of those a two-parter.  

I was knee-high to a piss-ant when the show was on, but I don't remeber the red cats showing up in center.

Perhaps they did the same thing PYL did, and have a list of predetermined configurations they chose from, and just picked one at random.  Gotta remeber, back then networking was not like it is today. Getting two computers to talk to each other was a chore-and-a-half, let alone 10.

[Dbacksfan12]

[quote name=\'TraderRob\' post=\'178268\' date=\'Feb 19 2008, 10:25 PM\']The screen displayed two symbols.[/quote]
(screen opens)
$ %
Wink: We're going to give you some extra time to think about this. (Cue think music).
Contestant: @!%!^!^%$$!$###%!!!