
Was the Wheel of Fortune One Letter Solve Really a Miracle? - DanielN
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/chris-jones/wheel-of-fortune-one-letter
======
thinkalone
Most of the article is only worth skimming through, but don't skim so fast
that you miss the kernel at the end ;)

> Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with
> the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts. They couldn't pull off
> that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could,
> either. Her brain can't possibly work that way, that fast. There's no way
> she solved that puzzle on her own. The game must be rigged.

> Or Burke has a gift, and she improved it with study. She practiced. She
> found the little edges and secrets that make large-size success possible;
> she did every last bit of the math. She earned her way to her place behind
> the wheel, and then, on that fateful day, in that particular pattern of
> rectangles and lights, she saw all that she needed to beat it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with
the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts.

Now that is condescending.

>They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that
nobody else could, either.

Suppose you'd never met Rain-Man and saw him pull off one of his counting
"stunts". Wouldn't your null hypothesis be that it was a trick? Now you meet
someone else, Derren Brown say, doing the same trick do you assume he does it
the same way or is it really a trick. Next you try with a buddy - first time
he gets it right, WTH? Savant, conjurer or lucky?

Once at school I got a run of about 8 dates fired at me (I can't remember the
context it might have been birth dates) and told people the day of the week
correctly for that date. They wondered how I did it, and as I'm good at maths,
figured it was some mental ability. As it happened I just guessed.

~~~
gjm11
The probability of getting 8 weekdays right in a row by random guessing is
1/7^8, or about 1 in 6 million. So _my_ random guess is that either the number
was substantially less than 8, or there was actually some extra information
that you made use of somehow, or you didn't really get them right and the
other people were just messing with your head. Or, of course, you're messing
with ours.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's crazy isn't it. Seriously, it was one of those moments where you think
"hey how am I doing this". I really thought for a very short while I had some
sort of untapped savantish ability to know the day for any date (I think there
are people that can do this based on some form of learning|equation?). In
actual fact I can barely remember the day it is today ...

The dates were being checked on this one kids graphing calc. He was the only
person in the class, in the school I suspect, that had one.

Whilst the chance of guessing 1 in 7 eight times in a row is very small, a
string of guesses that are correct in a larger population of guesses has no
greater probability of being in any particular place in the string than any
other. Provided that if I'd continued guessing a large number of times then I
only achieved c. 14% correct then there is nothing wrong statistically with
such a feat ...

Maybe I didn't guess at all. Maybe I had a psychic link with my classmates
Casio ... ;0)

------
mechanical_fish
My general impression is that the cryptographers routinely do stuff that's an
order of magnitude more mind-blowing than this. [1]

More people need to read _The Codebreakers_.

\---

[1] Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't
anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing
looks like a superpower.

~~~
mccutchen
_"Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram
well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks
like a superpower."_

I feel the exact same way. Well put.

~~~
dminor
I've noticed the same thing - Boggle comes easy, but Scrabble does not.

------
nollidge
Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy genius) has a blog post about this as well [1]. It
seems to me once you start down the decision tree starting with "I'VE GOT" at
the start, your average native English speaker should be able to get the right
answer quite easily.

[1] <http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=2250>

~~~
ambirex
I think the most telling part of that blog post is:

"Caitlin spins and guesses an ‘L’. Note that she has not yet solved the puzzle
at this point…if she was sure, she would have guessed ‘T’, a safe guess worth
three times the money. Why guess a second-tier letter like ‘L’? She’s probably
assuming the first word (_ ‘ _ _), with its apostrophe, is “I’LL,” but can’t
figure out what comes next. “I’ll put?” “I’ll say?”"

~~~
raganwald
What I found interesting about Ken's post was his conjecture that many other
players have solved the text after just one letter, but carried on playing to
maximize their cash winnings. According to him, we only know about her because
she chose to solve the problem and not risk the wheel. Thus, ending the game
after one letter may be extremely rare, but solving the problem after one
letter may be less rare than it seems.

~~~
nollidge
Used to watch the show with my Grandma a lot as a kid, and very often people
who know the answer (you can generally tell based on their confidence, and the
fact that they never buy a vowel) will keep spinning in order to make more
money.

------
bfung
The Price Is Right article mentioned in this article is pretty awesome also:
[http://www.esquire.com/features/impossible/price-is-right-
pe...](http://www.esquire.com/features/impossible/price-is-right-perfect-
bid-0810)

------
Gimpson
This American Life did a great show this summer which included a story about a
man who figured out the pattern in the board on the 80's game show Press Your
Luck and took them for a lot of money. Definitely worth a listen:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/412/m...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/412/million-dollar-idea)

Now that I look at the rest of that episode, it also included some coverage of
the Cambridge Innovation Center's Elevator Pitch contest, so all around a good
listen for the HN crowd.

~~~
btucker
And here's the video of Michael Larson on Press Your Luck:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EjKKGSXus>

~~~
zacharycohn
Musical hacks. It sounds like he hit STOP every time a certain note played.
Maybe he noticed a pattern that whenever someone hit "stop" on that note it
landed on a "big bucks" icon. So account for reaction time/delay, and ta-daa.
$100,000.

~~~
AntiRush
He realized that there were a set number of patterns. Once he figured that out
it was easy to hit the button when the next square was going to be the one he
wanted.

------
wccrawford
No, it wasn't. I looked at the still frame for about 20 seconds and got it
myself, before I saw the video.

It just took a little logic about what words could possibly be in certain
places, and the rest was filled in by phrases I heard in the past.

Edit: Don't get me wrong! It took guts for her to do that. If she got it just
a little wrong, she gave the next person a LOT of hints and it likely wouldn't
get back to her.

~~~
jerf
Yes, I recall amazing my family with a zero-letter solve before too. It's not
trivial, but I suspect we'd have an above-average concentration of people who
could do that around here.

No way could I do it under pressure right now, but then, if I knew I had a
Wheel of Fortune appearance coming up you'd better believe I'd be studying and
practicing. It amazes me that it's so obvious that so few people do that. Also
how many people play so badly from a game theoretic standpoint; spinning a
$400 on a puzzle with an obvious solution and a few open letters including one
triple letter, they choose one of the single letters then solve. No prize
puzzle, etc.

~~~
epochwolf
> It's not trivial, but I suspect we'd have an above-average concentration of
> people who could do that around here.

I don't know about that. All that's required is memorize and recall word
lists, breaking down a puzzle into components, and being able to do both of
those quickly. I think most people would be able to do it given practice. Most
school tests I've taken require similar skills.

~~~
jerf
I agree entirely. What I think would be above average around here is the
number of people who have made some effort in that direction, especially the
"breaking it down into components" part. It isn't that being an HN type is an
intrinsic advantage, it is that it is a shorter trip for us.

------
MBlume
Followed the embedded YouTube video and was rather disgusted by the comments
on it. Almost all suggested she cheated, and half suggested it in an
incredibly disgusting/demeaning/sexist way. Is this what the broader culture
assumes when a woman pulls off something clever?

~~~
brown9-2
Don't make the mistake of reading YouTube comments and making any sort of
broad judgments from them. It's pretty widely agreed that YouTube comments are
one of the strangest phenomenon online.

------
shasta
Apostrophes help you alot. I solved the following puzzle with no letters:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _

_ _ _ _

Category was "Thing".

(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe
and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).

~~~
pigbucket
It's either a telephone's ring

Or Microsoft's bing

or a fisherman's nets

or the president's pets

or a ballerina's toes

or (something that grows

when dishonesty flows)

Pinocchio's nose?

~~~
shasta
> Pinocchio's nose

Bing

~~~
bfung
In an attempt to solve, took bigrams from
[http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2010/07/20/after-the-
deadli...](http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2010/07/20/after-the-deadline-
bigram-corpus-our-gift-to-you/)

and ended up these top 10 entries:

    
    
      Schindler's	List	33
      president's	plan	32
      Microsoft's	Xbox	26
      yesterday's	post	17
      boatswain's	mate	16
      highlight's	from	16  <-- need to include only nouns
      Elizabeth's	time	16
      Wednesday's	show	13
      Microsoft's	IPTV	11
    

The answer didn't appear in the corpus, but there was 1 entry for

    
    
      Pinocchio nose  <-- no apostrophe and 's'
    

Looks like i need a bigger corpus and more data scrubbing, there must've been
something else that tipped you off before or during the show...

~~~
shasta
> there must've been something else that tipped you off before or during the
> show...

Not that I recall, but maybe so.

------
jonbishop
She's got a great quote in there about luck: "I really believe that luck is
preparation meeting opportunity"

~~~
snprbob86
It's a quote by Seneca, an ancient Roman philosopher:
<http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/4576.html>

~~~
jonbishop
Cool, thanks for letting me know. I've heard similar things before and I'm
trying to make it a mantra.

------
AgentConundrum
Even discounting all of the logic involved in this instance, people _do_
occasionally just get lucky.

When I was in the fifth grade, we were playing hangman in class and my friend
Chingfei managed to discern "White Men Can't Jump" from only two or three
letters. An impressive feat, proven by the fact that I remember this 14 years
later.

A "miracle" is really something with an extremely minuscule chance of
occurring, but with enough trials you'll eventually get a positive result.
Even the Biblical "water into wine" could happen under the laws of quantum
mechanics, but it's an insanely long shot.

Still, in this case it was logic, not luck, that played out, since no rational
person would just guess at solving the puzzle so early in the game.

------
run4yourlives
_I'LL HAVE WHAT SHE'S HAVING — didn't come close to fitting the puzzle, but it
made I'LL seem an unlikely starting point. Because HAVE is the word that
probably follows I'LL, and here, Burke was searching for a three-letter word._

Um, what?

I'll GET

I'll SEW

I'll AGE

I'll BAY

I'll BET

I'll DIG

I appreciate that none of these conjure memories of phrases off the top of my
head, but the idea that "have" is often the only option following "I'll" is
simply not true.

Let's face it, she's quick on her feet, smart, familiar with phrases and -
most importantly - _got lucky_.

~~~
brudgers
Phrases aren't drawn from anywhere in the English language. They must be
guessable.

There are not many phrases in popular culture starting with those combinations
(only "I'll get it," comes to mind). On the other hand phrases from movies are
common, and those with mild sexual references are more entertaining.

------
Jach
More letters is actually helpful: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPsbY8LLVlY>

------
dholowiski
This sounds like the classic 'overnight success' (after toiling for years in
obscurity) stories- a great lesson for all of us.

------
stoney
I'm pretty sure the phrase itself played a part here. Just imagine it - you've
figured out something that fits using only one letter. You're probably feeling
a little bit excited, but it's a bit of a gamble to guess - how many other
phrases might fit? _Do you have a good feeling about it...?_

------
qq66
No, it's not a miracle. I've done it before without any letters on the board.
Just a happy coincidence where one of the thoughts floating in your brain
happens to be the clue that day.

------
andyv
Of course, who could forget the puzzle in the "Family Guy" parody of WOF:

G. .UCK Y.URSEL.

(Phrase)

------
napierzaza
<quote>she immediately begins breaking it down into smaller pieces — "chunks,"
she calls them</quote>

I'm not sure you have to qualify that as something she calls them. I think a
lot of people would call those "chunks".

