[Gimpson]

This American Life did a great show this summer which included a story about a man who figured out the pattern in the board on the 80's game show Press Your Luck and took them for a lot of money. Definitely worth a listen:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...

Now that I look at the rest of that episode, it also included some coverage of the Cambridge Innovation Center's Elevator Pitch contest, so all around a good listen for the HN crowd.

[btucker]

And here's the video of Michael Larson on Press Your Luck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EjKKGSXus

[joezydeco]

I watched these episodes as a kid when they were shown on CBS the first time.

After about 10 spins or so it became obvious (or so I thought at the time) that he was waiting for a certain corner-corner-this.square combination to come up and then it would always stop on the $+spin square. There was nothing musical in there at all.

[zacharycohn]

Musical hacks. It sounds like he hit STOP every time a certain note played. Maybe he noticed a pattern that whenever someone hit "stop" on that note it landed on a "big bucks" icon. So account for reaction time/delay, and ta-daa. $100,000.

[AntiRush]

He realized that there were a set number of patterns. Once he figured that out it was easy to hit the button when the next square was going to be the one he wanted.

[sachinag]

There was an E! documentary about this, best referenced on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson