There must be easier ways
to make a living
24 March 2003
By Mark Pilarski
Dear Mark,
The other day I played keno with my best 20
lucky numbers. The special bonus was to hit all
twenty numbers and win $30,000, or not catch one
number and win close to $400. Well, my numbers
were lucky in the fact that none hit. I want to
know what the odds are of picking no numbers and
of picking 20. The keno runner was very suprised
and called over several people to make sure. My
husband said that they must of called the owner
at home cause this is such a rare event. Lacy S.
Headlines from the Home Office: "The chutzpa of
your favorite casino calling it a "Special
Bonus" ticket."
Let's get right to the 'rithmetic, Lacy,
compliments of "Blackjack," who is all knowing
in everything earthly and terrestrial. I mention
terrestrial here because Blackjack once worked
at Area 51, or so I believe he did. He claims he
won his lifestyle on the lake at craps, but I'm
not sure.
Blackjack says that the chances of hitting
twenty out of twenty in keno are 3.5353e+018. By
just moving the decimal point 18 spaces to the
right, you get 3,535,300,000,000,000,000 or a
bit over 3 1/2 quintillion to one. Now some
arithmetic wizard thinkin that he can one-up
Blackjack (I doubt any exist) by pointing out
that the number appears to be one of those made
up of an endlessly repeating sequence, and that
therefore the final 3 would be followed by a 5,
and should therefore be upped to 4, write it
this way: 3,535,400,000,000,000,000. But why
stop there? If the number is one of those
endlessly repeating sequences, Blackjack says
you can write it: 3,535,353,535,353,535,353.
Let's play!
Putting down one bean every three seconds for an
eight-hour working day, with a half hour off for
lunch and two 15-minute personal breaks, staying
at it full-time, i.e. 50 weeks per year, how
long would it take you, Lacy, to play
3,535,353,535,353,535,353 games? A trifle over
over 34 trillion years. How long is the earth
expected to remain habitable before the sun goes
nova? Three to five billion years.
So if you, Lacy, a gentically engineered wonder
and longevity ran in your clan (The Lost
Horizon), could arrange to take your keno game
along and continue play in roughly fourteen
thousand different solar systems, as they
sequentially come into being, evolve like ours,
and go BOOM!, you could complete game number:
3,535,353,535,353,535,353.
That's a tough assignment, however. Assuming
could keep on playing while moving from one
solar system to another, as one after the other
of them used up their life expectancy of 10-15
billion years, and if you didn't tire of the
sport prematurely, you would finish just about
when our Milky Way super-galaxy begins to run
low on expendable minor galaxies.
Good luck, Lacy! Meanwhile, read the fine print
on this bottle of Scotch.
Time used Games played
1 minute 1
1 hour 60
1 day [actual working time] 420
1 week 2,100
1 year [50 working weeks] 105,000
10 years 1,050,000
100 years 10,500,000
1000 years 105,000,000
1 million years 105,000,000,000
1 billion years 105,000,000,000,000
1 trillion years 105,000,000,000,000,000
34 years 3,535,353,535,353,535,353
Oh yeah, Lacy, the odds-to-1 against hitting no
numbers out of 20 are 842.38. Not too out of the
ordinary, but when the house is only paying you
about $400 clams, probably not worth playing
either.
Gambling quote of the week: "We would now like
to acknowledge our American friends who account
for about 80 per cent of the casinos'
attendance. By emptying your pockets, you've
helped pay down our debt and ease our taxes. We
call that mighty neighborly." The Windsor Star
(Canada)
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