The gods may throw the dice

[austin_dern]

The Price Is Right snuck in another playing of ``Pay The Rent'' this week, to my surprise, because last week they'd done a Salute To Nurses and I would've figured they'd go for the $100,000 tease then instead. Nope; the Nurses got Plinko but not the really big nobody-seems-to-get-this payout. Once again the contestant should have bailed out with $10,000, and by all rights should have, except she apparently comes from a land where a small bottle of Liquid Plumr plausibly costs more than $5.48.

Well, here goes. The prizes were the bottle of ``Drain Care'' product ($3.99), a bottle of tabasco ($1.69), a bag of Funnyuns ($1.49), a Crunch bar ($0.89), Ziploc bags ($2.69), and a jar of grape jelly ($2.79). Her placement was to start with the tabasco (level cost $1.69), and then the Funnyuns and Crunch bar ($2.38 total), then the jelly and the Ziploc bags ($5.48), and the Liquid Plumr on top ($3.99), as Drew Carey noted, the same way everybody arranges stuff in their house.

My Matlab/Octave script once again digs out two distinct solution sets. The first starts with the Ziploc bags ($2.69 level); then the tabasco and Funnyuns ($3.18); then the Crunch bar and grape jelly ($3.68); and finally the drain cleaner ($3.99). The alternative arrangement is to start with the grape jelly ($2.79); then the tabasco and Funnyuns again ($3.18, which made me think i was reading the wrong line of my results table); then the chocolate bar and the Ziploc bags ($3.58); and finally the Liquid Plumr ($3.99).

There've been multiple solutions now often enough that I'm tempted to go back to my old data sets, from when I worked this out by hand, and see whether the many times I found only the one solution was just because I gave up too soon. Maybe I will if I find an evening with more important stuff I should be doing first.

So far for the season, the range of prize prices has been $3.90, $4.80, $4.70, and $3.10. The range in winning levels, taking the more generous range, has been $3.20, $2.00, $2.30, and now a vicious $1.30.

Trivia: An 1842 report to the British government on the sanitary conditions of the working class found that more than 57 percent of working-class children born in Manchester died before reaching five years of age. Source: Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese.

Currently Reading: A Game Of Inches: The Stories Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 29, 2013, as there just are that many comic strips telling math jokes out there.

Comments

[moxie_man]

The contestant might have been from Maine where some types of Liquid Plumr ARE that expensive. You'd think all these people would do a quick tour of a local supermarket prior to arriving on set with their game show tickets in order to have a slight clue what local grocery prices are. You know, just in case, they're chosen as a contestant and need that info.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't remember if they said where she was from (although southern California is, probably for obvious reasons, the most popular origin).

I can understand the people who go to a taping with no particular ambition of getting on not bothering to look at nearby stores or such (they pick contestants out of the line and there's no guessing who'll catch the coordinator's eye as having that personality that makes a good contestant). But given there's only two games that a person with no pricing skills can still plausibly beat (Clock Game and Hole In One, and even Hole In One is helped if you do know something about prices), it'd seem like at least a bit of show-watching and grocery shopping would be worth the effort. I mean, it's $100,000 if you get the patterns right.