mathare
6th April 2006, 11:38
Today's Sun newspaper is advertising a competition being run by John Smiths in conjunction with their sponsorship of the Grand National this weekend.
To enter you text in your answer to a question along with your name and age. In reply you get allocated 5 numbers from 1 to 40. These correspond to horses in the big race and if the first five home match the numbers you received, in the same order, then you win a million quid.
This costs 25p plus your normal network but is it worth it?
To decide that we can use a bit of maths...
There are 40 runners and you select 5 of them. There are mathematical functions that can be used to work out how many ways there are of selecting a 5 objects from a set of 40 objects. Here, the order in which the objects are selected is important (i.e. 1-2-3-4-5 is different from 1-2-3-5-4) so the function we need is the permutation function.
NB What football pools punters know as perms (short for permutations) are actually combinations since the order is unimportant.
Excel is the quick way of doing this [=permut(40,5)] which we find gives a result of: 78,960,960
Yep, there are nearly 79 million ways of selecting 5 horses from the Grand National field if the order in which they finish is important.
Even if your text message is free (part of a network bundle say) you have to pay 25p entry fee to try and win £1 million (and I haven't checked the rules on multiple winners when you may end up splitting the million). That's a 4 million to 1 payout on a 79 million to 1 chance.
I'll let you decide for yourself if that offers any value...
NB I haven't checked if there are smaller payouts for getting any of the top 5. Such payouts would mean there is more value in this bet but that may still not make it worthwhile entering
To enter you text in your answer to a question along with your name and age. In reply you get allocated 5 numbers from 1 to 40. These correspond to horses in the big race and if the first five home match the numbers you received, in the same order, then you win a million quid.
This costs 25p plus your normal network but is it worth it?
To decide that we can use a bit of maths...
There are 40 runners and you select 5 of them. There are mathematical functions that can be used to work out how many ways there are of selecting a 5 objects from a set of 40 objects. Here, the order in which the objects are selected is important (i.e. 1-2-3-4-5 is different from 1-2-3-5-4) so the function we need is the permutation function.
NB What football pools punters know as perms (short for permutations) are actually combinations since the order is unimportant.
Excel is the quick way of doing this [=permut(40,5)] which we find gives a result of: 78,960,960
Yep, there are nearly 79 million ways of selecting 5 horses from the Grand National field if the order in which they finish is important.
Even if your text message is free (part of a network bundle say) you have to pay 25p entry fee to try and win £1 million (and I haven't checked the rules on multiple winners when you may end up splitting the million). That's a 4 million to 1 payout on a 79 million to 1 chance.
I'll let you decide for yourself if that offers any value...
NB I haven't checked if there are smaller payouts for getting any of the top 5. Such payouts would mean there is more value in this bet but that may still not make it worthwhile entering