About two weeks ago, I attended (and spoke at) the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) conference in Washington DC. I had the opportunity to hear a talk by my friend Bowen Kerins, who shared the "Probability in Game Shows". He has worked on a number of shows as a statistical consultant (Lately, the Jokers Wild), and shared nuggets from a few TPIR games, namely Dice Game and Master Key.
In Dice Game, he noted the "automatic win" nature when 3's and 4's appear in the price, and how the game can be controlled in this way.
In Master Key, he praised Scorpz's site as a wealth of info and had us all play a "game", using folders as keys. I was key 3. In our simulation, the player picked Key 4 and won a bag of skittles. But most fun was his analysis of where players pick, versus where the show places the keys:
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Here, Bowen alleged that the show went so far as to not even move the "good" keys out of the 1 and 5 slots for almost a whole season. Can anyone verify this? I suppose I could....but wonder if anyone noticed this off the top of their head.
In all, a fun, fun session with tons of nuggets!
