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Here's an actual case where understanding computer science would have been immensely helpful...
> The motivation for this aberrant behavior was a contest put on by a local radio station. Each day a disk jockey would read a serial number aloud on the air, and if any listener was able to produce the matching dollar bill they would win $30,000. Michael reasoned that 100,000 one dollar bills was 100,000 opportunities to win the prize, giving him a statistical advantage. And even if his scheme proved fruitless he would just redeposit his money, so he figured he had nothing to lose.
> Michael and Teresa spent each day rifling through piles of cash looking for matches, pausing only for such distractions as eating, bathing, and excreting. They soon realized that it was impossible for two people to examine that much money in the allotted time
(sort then binary search)
Maybe, but even then I doubt the scheme was well thought out. He had 100,000 bills but the total number of serial numbers is many magnitudes greater than that. The chance that he'd actually have a hit was close to zero. And that is assuming the contest was legitimate in the first place.
I had the same thought too, if you take the time to sort the bills the lookups are easy. And it probably doesn’t take much more time to sort them than it does to go through them all once looking for a number.
Yeah this part bothered me. It's surprising if they really didn't immediately realize randomly looking at single bills was an impossible strategy.
Kind of an interesting problem. Complete sorting in a timely manner is basically not possible because of the physical reality of 100k pieces of paper. But maybe you can group the bills into 100 piles of "last 2 digits", so then for each lookup you "only" have to check 1000 bills. And then later, while searching a group, you can take the time to further sort them by the 3rd digit. I guess it also depends on how long you expect the contest to go on, i.e. how many lookups you will do.
Even with the simplified grouping strategy, let's be generous and assume it takes you 3 seconds to look at a bill, figure out what to do with it, and physically move it to the correct place. That's still 83 person-hours to do a single pass and put the bills into 100 groups for quicker lookup. With 2 people, that's 5 full 8 hour days of non-stop sorting.
Maybe less lucrative but when we had some new bookshelves installed and moved all our books onto them I used mergesort to get them in order. ;)
This reminds me of the old website, "Where's George?"
Sample bill report: https://www.wheresgeorge.com/b:QZHjxdYnJ&entry=17
It's a triumph of regulation that he got his money. It would have been very natural for CBS to cite technical difficulties or find some other way to change the rules of the game, but US game shows in this era were terrified of the FCC, who were given strong powers to enforce fairness in game shows after some frauds in the 50s [0].
Those laws are still on the books, of course, but I expect game show producers have got better at working around them in the small print, while regulators haven't kept up.
The game shows now just buy insurance against extraordinary wins, and let Llyods of London handle it.
> game shows in this era were terrified
They still were 20 years later, and probably still are today. In Episode 6 of the Jeopardy! podcast[0], a former contestant coordinator recalls an instance where Ken Jennings, deep into his 2004 run and getting comfortable in the studio and with staff, was brought behind the board to check his appearance on monitors. But being "backstage" was a big red flag and several people had conniptions.
Game show producers want you to win big. Big winners are great advertisement. Management has a different idea of course, but management also understands that big winners bring in viewers and so they want to have big enough winners but not too big. Nobody wants to be accused of cheating as that is a scandal that can kill the game show.
It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams when they could spend the effort doing something sustainable. Or at least once you get away with one scam, use it for actual business, don't blow it on testing your luck again and again!
Scamming is fun, you don't have to be predictable or reliable or follow social norms, and your ceiling is limited by your own desire rather than a time schedule or a pay structure. (Of course, these days some scammers run firms with office space, schedules, and incentive structures!)
Also, a score yields some satisfying resentment; you're getting one over on those bastards.
I think a lot of people don't really have a good theory of mind of career criminals. The vast majority aren't regretfully finding themselves driven into crime; they like it and it's fun.
Cue that Key and Peele sketch about robbing a bank by posing as tellers and stealing only a couple of hundred dollars a day to avoid suspicion…
>> could spend the effort doing something sustainable.
There are large groups of people in the US who are very limited in what they can do. Convicted criminals cannot get certain jobs. Sex offenders are basically barred from most all employment. Illegal immigrants have problems with finance. I wouldn't say that all scammers come from such backgrounds, but it is incorrect to say that anyone and everyone is free to do anything.
Had that thought too, twice as much work just to steal the money. Yet, if you look, America often rewards (or at least encourages) thieves, rogues, scoundrels, ect...
Santos? Mostly encouragement if anything. Probably run for Governor.
Bernie Madoff? He had to turn himself in. 'treated in prison like a "Mafia don".' From WP:
> They call me either Uncle Bernie or Mr. Madoff. I can't walk anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and encouragement, to keep my spirit up. It's really quite sweet, how concerned everyone was about my well being, including the staff ... It's much safer here than walking the streets of New York.
Catch Me if You Can? Everybody wants to be the Wolf of Wall St.
Michael? Girlfriend, interviews, writeups, social fascination.
Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.
~ Fast Eddie Felson
Whatever ways you're thinking of, I bet they aren't as sustainable as you think.
Both entrepreneurs and scammers are trying all sorts of different ways to make money until they find something that happens to actually work.
It's all about finding a repeatable game and because he found one exploit he thought he could find others.
What about people that steal metal from buildings? Pull retail scams?
> It is hilarious how much effort some poeple will go to to make money through scams
Ego, in a word. The type of personality that does this thinks they're smarter than everyone else and seek to prove it.
Working is for chumps like us.
Highly recommend at least skimming the full episode.
If you go in to this knowing he knows how to beat the game, you'll also note that he reacts before he knows what prize he got, and is just reacting to landing on the right spot. Surely someone caught that in the moment, but couldn't have put together that he was celebrating because he knew he'd won.
wow "lightning-fast reflexes" is not overstated!! That looks incredibly difficult to pull off for so long. Thanks for the link
I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns.
I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular computing — and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems really lame if there was software driving it.
Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.
> Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.
They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options, probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys in subsequent rounds.
So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an extra spin on every board configuration.
>Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.
I'll speculate. I imagine they simply never audited the 5 patterns for full "whammy coverage". They just created 5 random patterns and didn't think any more about it. If they'd only had 3 or 4 patterns, maybe there would be a couple more whammy-less spaces. If they'd had 6 or 7, perhaps there wouldn't be any, just through random chance.
$331,381.55 in 2024 dollars. If only he'd invested it in the stock market rather than half-assed ponzi schemes he could have been reasonably comfortable.
The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy. And it's clear he absolutely loved these shenanigans. Losing it, regaining it, and finding something new - that was what he wanted and seemingly spent his entire life doing. The journey was the destination.
You can see this everywhere in all aspects of life as well. Jeff Bezos, and countless other billionaires, could easily retire tomorrow and have enough money to do essentially anything they could even dream of. So what do they do? Continue to work 60 hours a week doing pretty much the same stuff they were doing on their way up. Because they love it.
On the other end of the spectrum countless rappers have managed to break out of a life of crime to become successful and make millions. Yet many end up right back in that life of crime. It's because they enjoy the lifestyle. They don't want to just be comfortable, but to actually do what they enjoy.
If he had invested the prize in the S&P500, in order to be able to live from the investment income for 50 years (Michael was aged 33 when he won), he would have been able to withdraw only about $10,040 per year, in 1982 dollars, which is equivalent to $32,500 in today's dollars, which is a minimum wage salary. I don't think this is "reasonably comfortable".
The CAGR of the S&P 500, including dividends reinvested, inflation-adjusted, was about 9% in the 1982-2024 period [1], and my Python script below shows that starting with $110k, with this 9% CAGR, he would run out of money in about 50 years:
t = 110e3
for y in range(50):
t *= 1.09
t -= 10040
print(1982 + y, round(t))
1982 $109850
1983 $109687
1984 $109508
1985 $109314
1986 $109102
1987 $108871
1988 $108620
1989 $108346
1990 $108047
1991 $107721
1992 $107366
1993 $106979
1994 $106557
1995 $106097
1996 $105596
1997 $105049
1998 $104454
1999 $103805
2000 $103097
2001 $102326
2002 $101485
2003 $100569
2004 $99570
2005 $98482
2006 $97295
2007 $96001
2008 $94592
2009 $93055
2010 $91380
2011 $89554
2012 $87564
2013 $85394
2014 $83030
2015 $80453
2016 $77643
2017 $74581
2018 $71244
2019 $67606
2020 $63640
2021 $59318
2022 $54606
2023 $49471
2024 $43873
2025 $37772
2026 $31121
2027 $23872
2028 $15971
2029 $7358
2030 $-2030 # no more money
2031 $-12263
$100K would have been "comfortable retirement" money in the 80s. But I guess the same attitude that got you the money is what prevents you from quitting while you are ahead. A true gambler will always continue to double down until he loses it all.
Michael was aged 33 when he won the prize. $100k would not have been sufficient to plan for ~50 years of retirement, see the inflation-adjusted math here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302525
Not really. Adjusted for inflation, that's only $300,000 today. Even in the lowest cost of living areas, $300K isn't doing much for you. If you used it to buy a rental in a great area with a high return, you'd still only get about $15,000 a year in rental profits.
yeah, for people like that, money is just a way to measure how much smarter/slicker they are than their mark. it’s really about the grift. that $100k invested well in the 80s would have been an enormous portfolio in 30 years had he just been interested in a living.
Fun read. My favorite line: "Six months later, in May 1984, Michael Larson sat beardily in the interview room for the Press Your Luck auditions in Hollywood."
I liked the call back to this later: "With a raspy voice he unbeardily reminisced about his game show exploits "
> One of his later schemes involved opening a checking account with a bank that was offering a promotional $500 to each new customer; he would withdraw the cash at the earliest opportunity, close the account, then repeat the process over and over under assumed names.
He could do this today, without using assumed names, at different banks. Sign up for a bank account that's offering a bonus, comply with the fine print to the letter, get bonus, close account. Repeat at a different bank. This can be parallelized for increased performance. It's minorly lucrative.
There was probably only one local option for this when Larson did it, forcing him to use assumed names. Today there are countless online banking options available. No assumed names required.
$500 is a solid bonus today. That was even more money when Larson was doing this.
There's not that many banks. FDIC says 4,587 [1], and I think NCUA numbers are similar. And the vast majority of them don't have new account promotions. But yeah, if you have a clean chexsystem report and this is what you spend your time on, you too can become a bank promotion thousandaire. Credit card promotions seem more common, and have the benefit that they're usually distributed as a discount so they tend not to be taxable, unlike bank promotions that are usually distributed as interest. OTOH, getting lots of credit card promotions tends to require lots of spending, real or manufactured, and manufactured spending tends to be difficult to manage at high levels. If you have a job / business that involves a lot of credit card spending, it can be easy to make the credit card promotions work, but if you have that kind of job, you might make more money spending more time on work than spending more time seeking credit card promotions.
[1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/stat...
For Canadians at least, the redflagdeals forums are ground zero for this type of thing— typically you need to set up your direct deposit and pay a few bills to qualify for the bonus, but if you're disciplined about that, it seems you can collect a few payouts a year, not including any additional gains from teaser rates on savings accounts and the like.
Not really, since there are always conditions like keeping your account in a good state, with a minimum balance, having paycheck deposits etc. And even then it takes a few months for the bonus to be paid out. And only a handful of large banks offer such deals. You could maybe make a couple thousand dollars total in the span of a year or longer (assuming you have no existing bank accounts), which is hardly worth it.
This shows up here every now and then. Interesting story!
My friend in college in the 90's called his punk radio show "What wants to be a hundredaire?"
Not that it matters now, but I have deduced who burglarized their house.
Michael was certain that Teresa had something to do with it so he clearly told no one. Which makes sense for his personality.
Teresa not being a paranoid scam artist would have told someone. Especially if she felt like it was a chore.
Probably her best friend.
The Christmas party invitation was clearly from Teresa’s side since Michael doesn’t have the sort of friends who invite you to a Christmas party.
And it was probably her best friend.
Her best friend told someone, probably male, probably a younger relative, probably at the Christmas party. He was looking at them at the party realized they’d be here for hours and left early to go burglarize their house.
A call to the host of the Christmas party with that information would certainly be enough for her to think of the name.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen to guys like that if they just applied the same mindset to running a legitimate business.
This American Life also covered this in Ep. 412, act 4: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/412/million-dollar-idea
Great article, thank you. Sad, but unsurprising, that he lost it all in the end.
That was a delightful read. I wont give away the plot but I say good for him.
I calculated that for me to be financially independent I need to make only $750k.
Anyone with practical advice on how to make that realistically?
I'm not sure why people are calling this a scam (or maybe they refer to the other exploits described?)—the article itself says "even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken nary a rule."
But I have to say that it is heartbreaking that it is only the name of the girlfriend, and not the hacker who thought he was smarter than everyone, that is "Dinwitty."
Why are people calling this a scam?