TTD Beat the Dragon and S and P question

[clemon79]

I'd say that is well into the range of statistical significance. Wow.

[Neumms]

Imagine, if a Michael Larson had caught this then, he'd have OWNED Club Universe.

[rjaguar3]

[quote name=\'TraderRob\' post=\'185091\' date=\'Apr 29 2008, 11:27 PM\']

#1 - 4
#2 - 22
#3 - 3
#4 - 7
#5 - 14
#6 - 24
#7 - 7
#8 - 9
#9 - 11
unknown - 1

So 2, 5, 6 and 9 remain the 4 numbers that have had the dragon appear the most number of times.
[/quote]

And a quick check on my TI-89 gives a Chi-squared value of 39.08, and a p-value of less than 1x10^-5.  So it's definitely not due to pure chance.  Something was up.

/I wonder if any other shows had a similar problem
//but I don't think it would be rigging, as the contestant is playing against the house after all

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'rjaguar3\' post=\'185138\' date=\'Apr 30 2008, 06:27 PM\']
/I wonder if any other shows had a similar problem
//but I don't think it would be rigging, as the contestant is playing against the house after all[/quote]
Exactly.  It becomes fascinating to imagine what the reason for it is, though.  Did they leave it up to the computer to "randomly" assign spaces, and some limitation in early programming created something less than random that never got noticed?  Or did a producer (Ronnie Greenberg, perhaps!) just pick a number and end up picking the same one(s) too often in a perfectly innocent manner?
[quote name=\'Neumms\' post=\'185111\' date=\'Apr 30 2008, 11:52 AM\']Imagine, if a Michael Larson had caught this then, he'd have OWNED Club Universe.[/quote]
I get that you're joking, but let's remember the differences.  It's not like the Dragon never appeared behind certain numbers, and as far as I know, no one's come up with a pattern yet.  So a Thom McKee who was armed with this information might rack up a few more trips than he would randomly, but the average guy's single-chance odds would only improve slightly.

[TraderRob]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'185141\' date=\'Apr 30 2008, 07:28 PM\']
Did they leave it up to the computer to "randomly" assign spaces, and some limitation in early programming created something less than random that never got noticed?  Or did a producer (Ronnie Greenberg, perhaps!) just pick a number and end up picking the same one(s) too often in a perfectly innocent manner?
[/quote]

To me, it looks like there were a certain number of bonus boards, and those boards happened to favor the dragon behind certain numbers.  My next task is to take the 101 bonus boards and find out how many unique bonus boards there were.  There have been several occasions where the configuration was exactly the same when two bonus rounds were played on the same show.   Stay tuned...