I'm glad to see this topic continues to generate an almost religious fervour...
Returning to a couple of points made on the previous page:
Guest wrote:Surely the ball has the same momentum when it leaves the track however many times it goes round the spiral. The ball goes round the track until the momentum has dropped to a certain level.
I don't think I can argue with that. Perhaps I should have said it's easier to control the ball by keeping the shot short (less travel = less chaos).
Guest wrote:I don't think this business about dropping the ball in the top centre has any influence at all.
I'm not entirely convinced by the argument here. When I suggested that multicups may not be pure luck, I added this "applies particularly to the large 24 Cups". However, I believe there must still be a statistical advantage to aiming the ball above the centre cup. To put my reasoning in words would be rather cumbersome, so I'll try to bamboozle you with a picture (below). Idealized ricochet patterns are represented by four lines fanning down from each cup. Although it's highly simplified, a more realistic picture would demonstrate the same symmetry. The green and red lines indicate respectively winning and losing trajectories. If we follow the lines of a ball falling towards cup
2 there are a total of 15 winners. For cups
1 and
3, there are 12 winners each, and for cups
4 and
7 only 3.
Unfortunately, I can't do the experiments. I don't own a multicup, having dismissed them as "too random".
Bent Copper wrote:many people here seem to think that if a game is only 1% skill and 99% luck, it is a game of skill.
I don't see anyone saying this. I think those in the skill camp believe it to be a significant factor in many allwins. Nevertheless, if a game
was only 1% skill, it would still result in a skilful player coming out about 10 coins ahead of an unskilful one if they each played 1000 coins.
The question I posed in the
Skill v Luck Poll was
"Do you believe there's an element of skill in some payout allwins, or do you think they're 100% chance?" - maybe I should have asked
"Do you believe there's a significant element of skill in some payout allwins, or do you think they're almost 100% chance?".
If there was any skill involved allwins wouldn't have lasted 80+ years. With the millions of people playing them they would have made the operaters bankrupt in no time.
Not so. As I've said before, a game can be designed so that a skilful player can increase their odds. This is true of many modern fruit machines which reward
strategic play.
Although we've used the mechanical one arm bandit as the paradigm of a game of pure chance, even this is not clear cut. Margamatix's remark about people trying to skilfully manipulate the handles on these machines brought to mind something I read a long time ago. It's explained here by Donald Catlin:
Non Random Randomness.
Donald Catlin wrote:In 1946 an Idaho potato farmer was visiting a friend of his in Las Vegas who was a slot mechanic and was repairing broken slot machines. This Idaho farmer, while helping out his friend with the repairs, noticed that some machines of that vintage had a non-random feature. These machines contained a device called the clock fan, which determined how far each reel would turn on the next spin based upon when the pull lever was released during a 7 or 8 second period following the previous play. By noting the current stopping position of the reels a skilled player could reduce the range of sequential stopping positions of the reels on the next play by the way in which the pull lever was released. According to Scarne [Scarne, John, Scarne's New Complete Guide to Gambling, Simon & Schuster, 1974, pp 451-456] the man put his idea to the test and relieved Las Vegas of about $30,000 in slot winnings in a two-week period. I can't vouch for the amount but subsequent events proved that he was on to something...
...by 1949 to 1950 there were hundreds of players using this Idaho farmer's technique and they were called Rhythm Players. In 1950 there was even a pamphlet published explaining how to "rhythm" a machine. These players took the Nevada casinos for millions of dollars but by 1951 the fun was over. The slot manufacturers had developed and installed on each machine a device they called a variator which insured that each play was completely random and independent from the previous play.
One thing this demonstrates rather well, is that even when manufacturers intended to make mechanical games of pure chance, they could not easily do so.
By all accounts,
Rhythm Play was more effective than the better known
Rhythm Method commonly used before the invention of oral contraceptives.