PYL episode airing on GSN

[BillCullen1]

An interesting outcome on PYL airing on 9/2 on GSN. The winner of the game had a grand total of $0. The lady's name was Llewellyn and she won because her two opponents each whammied out. So she returns with $0 since she only had two whammies.

[Thunder]

Gnu. Gnu. Gnu?

[BillCullen1]

An interesting outcome on PYL airing on 9/2 on GSN. The winner of the game had a grand total of $0. The lady's name was Llewellyn and she won because her two opponents each whammied out. So she returns with $0 since she only had two whammies.

And Llewellyn is defeated on the next show. A one-day champion with $0 in winnings.

Peter - "You won nothing - and it's all in cash."

[BillCullen1]

Another interesting thing on the PYL airing on 9/22 on GSN. One guy took four spins, two in round one, two in round two and got a whammy each time. So he got four whammies in row. I've never seen that happen before.

[Thunder]

Assuming that the probability of hitting a whammy was 1/6 (using this webpage as the only citation I could find), the chances of hitting 4 whammies in a row would be 1/1296. Therefore, the probability of not hitting 4 whammies in a row is 1295/1296.

Based of those suppositions, here's the probability table of getting 4 whammies in a row as related to the number of attempts.

Probability = 1 - ((1295/1296) ^ X), where X is the number of attempts.



So once you get to 300 shows (at 3 contestants per show, that's 900 events), you see that there's about a 50/50 chance of that happening at least once.

/I love probability analysis.

[TLEberle]

Assuming that the probability of hitting a whammy was 1/6 (using this webpage as the only citation I could find), the chances of hitting 4 whammies in a row would be 1/1296. Therefore, the probability of not hitting 4 whammies in a row is 1295/1296.

Assuming that a contestant spins blindly and doesn't count whammies, there's nine on the board and 54 options, so 1/6.

Does your analysis describe that it's the first four spins, or just any four consecutive spins? Fascinating stuff all the same, just like the likelihood that two students in a classroom of thirty will share a birthday.

[Thunder]

The methodology actually holds true for any four spins and they don't have to be consecutive. If you had a giant database of every board spin, you could say "Spin #7142, Spin #9, Spin #357 and Spin # 14000" and look them up in the table. This probability analysis above still holds true.

The "Birthday Paradox" probability increases to 1 at a much greater factor than the PYL table does because each subsequent event has a greater probability of happening. Student #2 has to match Student #1, Student #3 can match either #1 or #2, and Student #24 then has 23 chances to match the previous students.

In the PYL experiment, each spin is an independent event with the same never-changing 1/6 probability. That means it takes a much higher number of events to reach certainty. Fun Fact: The probability of the PYL 4 whammies in a row happening will never actually become 1 (guaranteed certainty) no matter how many events that you put into the model.

Since you find it fascinating, I changed the scale of the model. Note the rapid rise of the event's probability to begin with. Contrast that with the infinitesimal increases at the bottom of the table.



/Man, I truly love doing probability.

[Ian Wallis]

Getting 4 whammies consecutively wasn't that rare - it happened at least four or five times.  There were at least two episodes from 1986 where this occurred - one of them from sometime in June or July where a contestant did it all in the second round.

[parliboy]

Getting 4 whammies consecutively wasn't that rare - it happened at least four or five times.  There were at least two episodes from 1986 where this occurred - one of them from sometime in June or July where a contestant did it all in the second round.

I don't understand how that disagrees with Sean's table.