Friday, August 24, 2007
How to Win on “Power of 10”
byFor those of you who haven’t seen Power of 10, it is basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire/Family Feud cross where a contestant attempts to guess the results of a survey.
What I found interesting about the show is that the contestant gets to poll the audience for their guess on every question. As many devout fans know, there was similar help available on Millionaire, but only on one of the 15 questions. This limitation made sense for the show’s producers as the audience was correct 90% of the time.
Questions on Power of 10 are a bit different than on Millionaire because they are based on guessing survey results rather than knowing facts. What makes this type of question difficult is that there is not a correct answer that could be known in advance. A question like “What is bigger: the moon or an elephant?” has an answer that a contestant may have learned in the past. A question like “What percentage of Americans said Vin Diesel invented the diesel engine instead of Rudolf Diesel?” is more difficult because it is very unlikely that the contestant would know the answer.
Perhaps the producers of Power of 10 assumed that with a question where the contestant can never trust their answer, they would be even more confused once they saw the audience’s opinion. In reality, however, groups of people actually excel at predicting how other will answer and are correct more often than even “experts”. For example, in the Iowa Electronic Markets, traders don’t simply register what their vote will be, they attempt to answer how others will vote. The predictions made by these traders have proven more accurate than polls and experts are. For a longer discussion, see “The Science of Success” by James Surowiecki.
The audience on the Power of 10 should prove to be pretty helpful to contestants. That said, the producers should be prepared to give out a lot of money…
How well does this theory stack up? For reference, the questions and results from the first episode of Power of Ten are shown at the bottom. The green line represents the correct answer. The red lines represent the range that the contestant selected. The graph is how the audience responded.
If the contestant simply went with the audience’s answer, they would have gotten questions 1 and 2 correct for sure. Question 3 would have been won as well by estimating an average rather than attempting to bracket the highest peak. Question 4 would have been lost, however. 75% isn’t quite 90%, but data from several games will be required before a final verdict can be given. Over the run of the series, I believe that the audience is going to do very well and will provide a huge assistance to any contestants that listen to them.
