Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by btucker 5706 days ago
And here's the video of Michael Larson on Press Your Luck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_EjKKGSXus
2 comments

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.

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.
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.