Astochastic

I happened to watch last night's Jeopardy, where for the first time, the contestants ended with a three-way tie.

I feel the need to link to this commentary:

Also silly:

CBS Television Distribution, which syndicates the show for Sony Pictures claims a statistician they hired calculated the odds of a three-way tie on the show as one in 25 million.

One in 25 million? How do you determine the odds of something that's not random? The final scores aren't determined by flipping a coin, they're determined by bets. And today's end result may have been partly due to luck (the contestants being in scoring position for a tie, everyone knowing the correct answer), but mostly it happened because Scott made it possible for it to happen.

Yay for the increasing innumeracy of the American public, being assisted by television shows like Numb3rs.

Note to CBS: this was your chance to use the term "game theory" without sounding like a schmuck, and you blew it!