I just watched the end of a new gameshow on NBC - Deal or No Deal. (Not the best strategy for NBC's homepage, btw - of course I want their homepage!)
Basically, the contestant is presented with a set of 26 boxes, each containing a sum of cash - anywhere from $0.01 to $1,000,000. Over the course of the show, they are invited to eliminate the boxes, one at a time, with the view of going home with the contents of the one remaining box. However every so often, the "banker" will call them, offering to buy them off with a cash value to walk away.
My dad mentioned that there was a similar show airing in the UK, hosted by the Bransonesque Noel Edmonds who, I'm proud to say, has his own cheesy website. (Now awaiting comment from a certain S. Collier in Mid Glamorgan.)
For what it's worth, the banker is a stereotypical fat guy in a suit, silhouetted with a laptop in an office above the studio floor.
At any time during the show, basic statistics suggest that the contestant's expected take-home pay is the sum of the contents of the remaining boxes divided by the number of boxes remaining. At the start of the show, this equates to $125,736.
Towards the start of the show, the banker's offers come in lower than the expected take-home - having eliminated four boxes, a guy on tonight's show had an expected take-home of $115,000 and was offered a measly buy-out of $7,000. As things progress, and the number of remaining boxes decreases, the banker becomes more of a talking Excel formula, always offering round(sum(boxes)/count(boxes),1000) dollars, or put another way, the expected take-home, rounded up or down to the nearest $1,000.
Over time the show will make money, as long as its advertising revenue (of which there must be a lot, given the number of cliff-hanging decisions that are delayed as a result) is over $125k per show. Tonight's main contestant got greedy, refusing to take $137,000 (cleverly calculated by our fat banker using the formula above), and walking away with the subsequent offer of $25,000 (again calculated using the formula above, with a cool $500,000 swiped from the numerator and only one taken from the denominator). Unlucky!
In comparison to Millionaire, Deal/No Deal takes the uncertainty out of the equation for the producers, and takes the skill out of the equation for the contestant. Everyone's a winner.
