science of board games

I thought I would pass along one of my favorite stories involving a kind of game science. In this case, rather than being board game science, it's actually about a game show.

Michael Larson was a contestant on Press Your Luck in 1984. The game was a simple kind of gambling, involving players taking "spins" on a board, where they have a chance at winning money, or losing it all. The gimmick of the show were the Whammies, which were little red cartoon creatures that would dance across the screen and take all of a contestant's money when they hit them.

The science comes in with Michael. Michael discovered, through OCD-like analysis, that the game's randomizer was very poor: the squares on the board were selected in a few fixed patterns, and Whammies would only appear in certain squares, and never in others. Even better, some of the bigger amounts of money appeared in those Whammy-free squares.

Armed with this knowledge, Michael went on the show and tore it apart, winning over $110,237.

I find it an inspirational story to show what kind of results can come from simple analysis of a game.

Photo — Mike Fischer