Why Someone Should Take That Deal

Let me start answering my Deal or No Deal-based question by just pointing to Chiaroscuro’s answer, which does the arithmetic exactly right and comes to a quite sensible conclusion from it. This leaves me feeling like I’m not quite earning my pay here, so let me go into further depth and ask that someone pay me.

Bad Luck on Deal Or No Deal

Mathstina, in a post from August 25, put put a video from the Australian version of Deal Or No Deal which showed a spectacularly unlucky contestant, a contestant unlucky enough to inspire word problems. I quite like game shows, partly because I was a kid in an era — the late 70s and early 80s — when the American daytime game show was at a creative and commercial peak, when one could reasonably expect to see novel shows on two or three networks from 9 am until 1 or 2 pm, and partly because they give many wonderful, easy-to-understand mathematics problems. Here’s one I based on the show and used as an exam problem.

About Chances of Winning on The Price Is Right

Putting together links to all my essays about trapezoid areas made me realize I also had a string of articles examining that problem of The Price Is Right, with Drew Carey’s claim that only once in the show’s history had all six contestants winning the Item Up For Bids come from the same seat in Contestants’ Row. As with the trapezoid pieces they form a more or less coherent whole, so, let me make it easy for people searching the web for the likelihood of clean sweeps or of perfect games on The Price Is Right to find my thoughts.

Proving Something With One Month’s Counting

One week, it seems, isn’t enough to tell the difference conclusively between the first bidder on Contestants Row having a 25 percent chance of winning — winning one out of four times — or a 17 percent chance of winning — winning one out of six times. But we’re not limited to watching just the one week of The Price Is Right, at least in principle. Some more episodes might help us, and we can test how many episodes are needed to be confident that we can tell the difference. I won’t be clever about this. I have a tool — Octave — which makes it very easy to figure out whether it’s plausible for something which happens 1/4 of the time to turn up only 1/6 of the time in a set number of attempts, and I’ll just keep trying larger numbers of attempts until I’m satisfied. Sometimes the easiest way to solve a problem is to keep trying numbers until something works.

In two weeks (or any ten episodes, really, as talked about above), with 60 items up for bids, a 25 percent chance of winning suggests the first bidder should win 15 times. A 17 percent chance of winning would be a touch over 10 wins. The chance of 10 or fewer successes out of 60 attempts, with a 25 percent chance of success each time, is about 8.6 percent, still none too compelling.

Here we might turn to despair: 6,000 episodes — about 35 years of production — weren’t enough to give perfectly unambiguous answers about whether there were fewer clean sweeps than we expected. There were too few at the 5 percent significance level, but not too few at the 1 percent significance level. Do we really expect to do better with only 60 shows?

What Can One Week Prove?

We have some reason to think the chance of winning an Item Up For Bids, if you’re the first one of the four to place bids — let’s call this the first bidder or first seat so there’s a name for it — is lower than the 25 percent which we’d expect if every contestant in The Price Is Right‘s Contestants Row had an equal shot at it. Based on the assertion that only one time in about six thousand episodes had all six winning bids in one episode come from the same seat, we reasoned that the chance for the first bidder — the same seat as won the previous bid — could be around 17 percent. My next question is how we could test this? The chance for the first bidder to win might be higher than 17 percent — around 1/6, which is near enough and easier to work with — or lower than 25 percent — exactly 1/4 — or conceivably even be outside that range.

The obvious thing to do is test: watch a couple episodes, and see whether it’s nearer to 1/6 or to 1/4 of the winning bids come from the first seat. It’s easy to tally the number of items up for bid and how often the first bidder wins. However, there are only six items up for bid each episode, and there are five episodes per week, for 30 trials in all. I talk about a week’s worth of episodes because it’s a convenient unit, easy to record on the Tivo or an equivalent device, easy to watch at The Price Is Right‘s online site, but it doesn’t have to be a single week. It could be any five episodes. But I’ll say a week just because it’s convenient to do so.

If the first seat has a chance of 25 percent of winning, we expect 30 times 1/4, or seven or eight, first-seat wins per week. If the first seat has a 17 percent chance of winning, we expect 30 times 1/6, or 5, first-seat wins per week. That’s not much difference. What’s the chance we see 5 first-seat wins if the first seat has a 25 percent chance of winning?

Figuring Out The Penalty Of Going First

Let’s accept the conclusion that the small number of clean sweeps of Contestants Row is statistically significant, that all six winning contestants on a single episode of The Price Is Right come from the same seat less often than we would expect from chance alone, and that the reason for this is that whichever seat won the last item up for bids is less likely to win the next. It seems natural to suppose the seat which won last time — and which is therefore bidding first this next time — is at a disadvantage. The irresistible question, to me anyway, is: how big is that disadvantage? If no seats had any advantage, the first, second, third, and fourth bidders would be expected to have a probability of 1/4 of winning any particular item. How much less a chance does the first bidder need to have to get the one clean sweep in 6,000 episodes reported?

Chiaroscuro came to an estimate that the first bidder had a probability of about 17.6 percent of winning the item up for bids, and I agree with that, at least if we make a couple of assumptions which I’m confident we are making together. But it’s worth saying what those assumptions are because if the assumptions do not hold, the answers come out different.

The first assumption was made explicitly in the first paragraph here: that the low number of clean sweeps is because the chance of a clean sweep is less than the 1 in 1000 (or to be exact, 1 in 1024) chance which supposes every seat has an equal probability of winning. After all, the probability that we saw so few clean sweeps for chance alone was only a bit under two percent; that’s unlikely but hardly unthinkable. We’re supposing there is something to explain.

Finding, and Starting to Understand, the Answer

If the probability of having one or fewer clean sweep episodes of The Price Is Right out of 6,000 aired shows is a little over one and a half percent — and it is — and we consider outcomes whose probability is less than five percent to be so unlikely that we can rule them out as happening by chance — and, last time, we did — then there are improbably few episodes where all six contestants came from the same seat in Contestants Row, and we can usefully start looking for possible explanations as to why there are so few clean sweeps. At least, that’s the conclusion at our significance level, that five percent.

But there’s no law dictating that we pick that five percent significance level. If we picked a one percent significance level, which is still common enough and not too stringent, then we would say this might be fewer clean sweeps than we expected, but it isn’t so drastically few as to raise our eyebrows yet. And we would be correct to do so. Depending on the significance level, what we saw is either so few clean sweeps as to be suspicious, or it’s not. This is why it’s better form to choose the significance level before we know the outcome; it feels like drawing the bullseye after shooting the arrow the other way around.

The Significance of the Item Up For Bids

The last important idea missing before we can judge this problem about The Price Is Right clean sweeps of Contestants Row is the significance level. Whenever an experiment is run — whether it’s the classic probability class problems of flipping coins or rolling dice, or whether it’s watching 6,000 episodes of a game show to see whether any seat produces the most winners, or whether it’s counting the number of red traffic lights one gets during the commute — there are some outcomes which are reasonably likely, some which are unlikely, and some which are vanishingly improbable.

We have to decide that some outcomes have such a low probability of happening naturally that they represent something going on, and are not just the result of chance. How low that probability should be is our decision. There are some common dividing lines, but they’re common just because they represent numbers which human beings find to be nice round figures: five percent, one percent, half a percent, one-tenth of a percent. What significance level one picks depends on many factors, including what’s common in the field, how different outcomes are expected to be, even what one can afford. Physicists looking for evidence of new subatomic particles have an extremely high standard before declaring something is definitely a new particle, but, they can run particle detection experiments until they get such clear evidence.

To be fair, we ought to pick our significance level before we’ve worked out the probability of something happening, but this is the earliest I could discuss it with motivation for you to read about it. But if we take the five percent significance level, we see we know already that there’s a little more than a one and a half percent chance of there being as few clean sweeps as observed. The conclusion is obvious: all six winning contestants in an episode should have come from the same seat, over 6,000 episodes, more often than the one time Drew Carey claimed they had. We can start looking for explanations for why there should be this deficiency.

Or …

The First Tail

We became suspicious of the number of clean sweeps in The Price Is Right when there were not the expected six of them in 6,000 episodes. The chance there would be only one was about one and a half percent, not very high. But are there so few clean sweeps that we should be suspicious? That is, is the difference between the expected number of sweeps and the observed number so large as to be significant? Is it too big to just result from chance?

This is significance testing: is whatever quantity we mean to observe dramatically less than what is expected? Is it dramatically more? Is it at least different? Are these differences bigger than what could be expected by mere chance? For every statistician’s favorite example, a tossed fair coin will come up tails half the time; that means, of twenty flips, there are expected to be ten tails. But there being merely nine or as many as twelve is reasonable. Three or fifteen tails may be a little unlikely. Zero or twenty seem impossible. There’s a point where if our observations are so different from what we expect then we have to reject the idea that our observations and our expectations agree.

It’s not enough to say there’s a probability of only 1.5 percent that there should be exactly one clean sweep episode out of 6,000, though. It’s unlikely that should happen, but if we look at it, it’s unlikely there should be any outcome. Even the most likely result of 6,000 episodes, six clean sweeps, has only about one chance in six of happening. That’s near the chance that the next person you meet will have a birthday in either September or November. That isn’t absurdly unlikely, but, the person betting against it has the surer deal.

Significance Intrudes on Contestants Row

We worked out the likelihood that there would be only one clean sweep, with all six contestants getting on stage coming from the same seat in Contestants Row, out of six thousand episodes of The Price Is Right. That turned out to be not terribly likely: it had about a one and a half percent chance of being the case. For a sense of scale, that’s around the same probability that the moment you finish reading this sentence will be exactly 26 seconds past the minute. It’s pretty safe to bet that it wasn’t.

However, it isn’t particularly outlandish to suppose that it was. I’d certainly hope at least some reader found that it was. Events which aren’t particularly likely do happen, all the time. Consider the likelihood of this single-clean-sweep or the 26-seconds-past-the-minute thing happening to the likelihood of any given hand of poker: any specific hand is phenomenally less likely, but something has to happen once you start dealing. So do we have any grounds for saying the particular outcome of one clean sweep in 6,000 shows is improbable? Or for saying that it’s reasonable?

Off By A Factor Of 720 (Or More)

To work out the task of figuring out whether it was plausible that there had been only one “clean sweep”, of all six contestants winning the Item Up For Bid on The Price Is Right coming from the same seat, we had started a little into the binomial distribution. The key ideas included that we have “Bernoulli trials”, a number of independent chances for some condition to happen — in this case, we had about 6,000 such trials, the number of hourlong episodes of The Price Is Right — and a probability p of successfully seeing some event occur on any one episode. We worked that out to be somewhere about p = 1/1000, if every seat is equally likely to win every time. There is also a probability of 1 – p or 999/1000 of the event failing to see this event, that is, that one or more contestants comes from a different seat.

To find the probability of seeing some number, call it x since we don’t particularly care what it is, of successes out of some larger number, call it N because that’s a convenient number, of trials, we need to figure out how many ways there are to arrange x successes out of N trials. For small x and N values we can figure this out by hand, given time. For large numbers, we’d never finish if we tried by hand. But we can solve it, if we attack the problem methodically.

Came On Down

On the December 15th episode of The Price Is Right, host Drew Carey mentioned as the sixth Item Up For Bids began that so far that show, all the contestants who won their Item Up For Bids (and so got on-stage for the pricing games) had come from the same spot so far, five out of six. He said that only once before on the show had all the contestants come from the same seat in Contestants Row. That seems awfully few, but, how many should there be?

We can say roughly how many “clean sweep” shows we should expect. There’ve been just about 6,000 episodes of The Price Is Right played in the current hour-long format (the show was a half-hour its first few years after being revived in 1972; it was a very different show in previous decades). If we know the probability of all six contestants in one game winning their Item Up For Bids — properly speaking, it’s called the One-Bid, but nobody cares — and multiply the probability of six contestants in one show coming from the same seat by the number of shows, we have the number of shows we should expect to have had such a clean sweep. This product, the chance of something happening times the number of times it could happen, is termed the “expected value” or “expectation value”, or sometimes just the “mean”, as in the average number to be, well, expected.

This makes a couple of assumptions. All probability problems do. For example, it assumes the chance of a clean sweep in one show is unaffected by clean sweeps in other shows. That is, if everyone in the red seat won on Thursday, that wouldn’t make everyone in the blue seat winning Friday more or less likely. That condition is termed “independence”, and it is frequently relied upon to make probability problems work out. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to prove: how do you prove that one thing happening doesn’t affect the other?

One Goat Short

I like game shows. Liking game shows is not one of the more respectable hobbies, compared to, say, Crimean War pedantry, or laughing at goats. Game shows have a long history of being sneered at by people who can’t be bothered to learn enough about game shows to sneer at them for correct reasons. Lost somewhere within my archives is even an anthology of science fiction short stories about game shows, which if you take out the punch lines of “and the loser DIES!” or “and the host [ typically Chuck Woolery ] is SATAN!”, would leave nearly nothing, and considering that science fiction as a genre has spent most of its existence feeling picked-on as the “smelly, unemployed cousin of the entertainment industry” (Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese) that’s quite some sneering. Sneering at game shows even earned an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore show which managed to be not just bad but offensively illogical.

Nevertheless, I like them, and was a child at a great age for game shows on broadcast television: the late 1970s and early 1980s had an apparently endless menu of programs, testing people’s abilities to think of words, to spell words, to price household goods, and guess how other people answered surveys. We haven’t anything like that anymore; on network TV about the only game shows that survive are Jeopardy! (which nearly alone of the genre gets any respect), Wheel of Fortune, The Price Is Right, and, returned after decades away, Let’s Make A Deal. (I don’t regard reality shows as game shows, despite a common programming heritage. I can’t say what it is precisely other than location and sometimes scale that, say, Survivor or The Amazing Race do that Beat The Clock or Truth Or Consequences do not, but there’s something.) Now and then something new flutters into being, but it vanishes without leaving much of a trace, besides retreading jokes about the people who’d watch it.

All that is longwinded preliminary to one of those things that amuses mostly me. On the Thursday (27 October) episode of Let’s Make A Deal, they briefly looked like they might be playing The Monty Hall Problem.