ARCADE SCAM SCIENCE (not clickbait)

I designed this machine to win the jackpot everytime on our kid games like these where you have to hit the button at the exact moment the light comes by So the plan was for me to be a hero amongst my buddies and a veritable Chuckie Cheese Robin Hood giving out free tickets to all The little kids, but that's not What actually happened it actually turned out way more interesting and the more I tested the more I realized this was turning into a repeat of when I use physics to expose the rigged carnival games because by building this super precise Little robot I discovered arcade games like this are pretending to be one thing when in fact They're total scams. now in order to explain just how bad they're scamming you let me first explain how my machine works and then walk through the results of our testing for the past two months Fundamentally the way this works is you have a photoresistor right here And it senses the light five or six lights Upstream of where you need to hit the button to get a jackpot and then after a pre-programmed delay the plunger comes down and hits The button. To build this my buddy John And I started by designing the main base in CAD and then we 3D printed it overnight And then we attached the photoresistor at the end of the articulating arm And then we took a solenoid with a plunger and attached it to the base It's powered by 20 volts worth of double-A batteries And this is the same power pack I use to trigger the Super Soaker and the brains of the operation Is this wireless Arduino board and it connects via Wi-Fi to a Super ghetto app that we made an app is critical because it lets you adjust the delay between Sensing the light and pushing the plunger so if you miss short You just add a few milliseconds to the delay and try again And then to disguise the whole thing we put it in a backpack and cut a hole in the bottom so the plunger could access the big button on the machine So to set it up. You simply walk in set the backpack down and then pull out your phone like you're checking dankmemes as you can see the disguise worked really well And no one ever suspected anything. so at this point. We were ready for our first real-world test and the results were disappointing We were getting jackpots, but only about every 30 tries, and what was so frustrating is we got the timing dialed in so well we would miss short by one light and then not adjust the timing at all and then the very next run we This long by one light. So for 30 attempts without changing anything about half were missing one light short and the other half were missing One light long so this could mean only one of two things, either we had some errors in our machine that was introducing some variability or there was something shady going on with the game itself And troubleshooting because things don't go as planned is incredibly common with doing any engineering task so to fix it you have to Systematically do some detective work to figure out where the error is coming from. In the last interview Carl Sagan ever gave He said science is more than a body of knowledge It's a way of thinking so here was our thought process and if I can prove that my Machine was super precise then the only reason we weren't getting a jackpot would be because the game was rigged so I needed to start By looking at any potential sources of variability error in my machine there were only three so it could be the Photoresistor the solenoid or the arduino. There was one External source we considered and that was light pollution from all the flashing lights in the arcade could mean the input to the light sensor Was too noisy and therefore not repeatable now There's a trick when it comes to troubleshooting where you test several? Potential error sources at the same time, and if I can get really precise results within this loop Then I know that none of those components are the source of the error without having to take time to test each individually so to test all three of these at once we made a simple app that flashed a white screen and started a stopwatch at the Exact same time and then we set the trigger for exactly one second later and sure enough we were getting results with one millisecond precision We also repeated the test with an incandescent bulb just like the game and got the same super accurate results Now to appreciate that one millisecond of precision one flap of a hummingbird wing takes 12 Milliseconds so one millisecond is literally this long if you pull out your phone and trying it the stopwatch to land on four point Zero zero seconds that's really hard And this is just a two decimal places I had some friends of mine use a timer app that went out to three decimal places which is milliseconds and then I Challenged them to land exactly on four seconds and in one hundred tries these mere humans with their pitiful non machine reaction times Were only able to do it once whereas my robot can do it pretty much every time So there's definitely no error coming from the hardware components But maybe the sensor is being told to trip at different times because there's so many additional Flashing lights in an arcade and to investigate that we looked at the signal data from the sensor Which looked really noisy And low like this until you see a spike in Intensity every time the light would come around which is when the delay countdown would start because we have such a narrow field of view On the sensor when we compared the time between each of the peaks it was also precise down to the millisecond so light pollution Wasn't the issue either With this in mind I headed to a different arcade with some family friends and their kids to see if things would be any different And we did win a few jackpots But for the most part once again We would alternate missing by one light on either side of the jackpot without making any Adjustments to my machine which as a reminder can repeatedly hit the same mark within 1/12 of a hummingbird wing flap and so at this point it was pretty clear that these games just randomly hand out rare jackpots but just to be sure I did some digging and was able to locate a 25 year old manual for the cyclone arcade game and Sure enough if you flipped all the way to the back to page 31 it states the machine owner can specify How often they want a jackpot to be won Which actually makes sense because in our testing a lot of times We'd hit a jackpot right away, and then go through a dry spell until we would finally get a jackpot again on average Maybe 30 games later and so in conclusion My issue here isn't that this arcade game makes money for the arcade owner My issue is this arcade game presents itself as a winnable game of skill when in reality It's a random dice roll That is heavily stacked against you And if you recall from the carnival scam video the most lucrative games for the carnival owner are those where people overestimate their chances of winning that is Exactly what happens in this game especially when you might play a few games And get it to stop one light short or one light long thinking You are so close to getting a jackpot when in reality you weren't close at all in gambling psychology this is known as the near miss effect and people will spend much more money to try and win because they think they can just Do it on the next one and for that reason it should come as no surprise That this scam machine is considered the highest earning redemption arcade game ever made so if I were you I'd save your tokens for skee-ball There's a plunger in the backpack and then it pushes down on the thing is that cool So you're basically cheating? Well I mean cheating is a strong word I'm using an advantage I might have created myself It's a new year Which means it's time to make new goals and one of my new goals for this year is learning how to make really cool motion graphics animations like the guys from the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt And to do that I'm using skillshare.com Who were also kind of to support this video. in this class they cover all the basics as well as how to animate their cool little bird And there's a bunch of free downloadable files So you can follow along with the instructions. And skillshare has a bunch of different courses from photography to marketing to tutorials on that you think you just bought or maybe you want to learn to make videos like this it's less than ten bucks a Month for their premium membership and that gives you full access to all their classes and the first 300 people to use the link in the video description Get two months for you to try it out. So if you appreciate the work I put into these videos and you want to start the new year off right by expanding your mind and setting a goal you can Actually achieve, click the link in the video description to get started Thanks for watching

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 16,379,196

Rating: 4.9208841 out of 5

Keywords: arcade, scam, science, cyclone, arcade scam, arcade hack, game, nasa, mark rober, carnival, carnival scam science, rigged game, cheat, how to win, robot, maker, skillshare

Id: vXBfwgwT1nQ

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/_scienceftw_]

Hey, I’m Mark Rober and that’s my video! I love being able to use scientific rigor to definitively answer questions people speculate about. I’d be happy to answer any follow up questions you guys might have when I get home from work tonight.

[u/mattpilz]

A law should be enacted to make it mandatory for gambling machines like this and all the other fake "skill-based" ones to publicly display the odds of winning, just as the lottery system does.

I've reviewed manuals of other machines and by default they almost all are set to only give a chance of winning every so many hundreds of turns (700 in some cases), and they could be adjusted up to 9,999 before any chance of winning at all.

It is depressing to have watched all the regional arcades transition from traditional video games and stuff like air hockey to these secretive scams, and they make a killing doing so. I know people who have blown over $50 on a single "Key Master" game insisting that they just about had the prize every time, but never got it cause the pay-out rate was so outrageous.

[u/4152510]

I'm really liking this guy's channel, he takes a great empirical approach to carefree, fun problems

[u/teridon]

My question is -- if this is a game of chance, it's now a gambling machine, right? I ain't no lawyer, but doesn't that mean kids cannot be allowed to play it? And doesn't it require a different sort of license to sell and operate?

[u/ErgoNonSim]

I thought it was common knowledge that the odds of winning are set by the house. Even in casino games. Those odds are regulated by law and there's certain limits they can't go over. For example in the UK if a crane machine has fixable odds its regarded as a "gaming machine" and the player needs to be informed : http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/for-gambling-businesses/Compliance/Sector-specific-compliance/Arcades-and-machines/Non-complex-cat-D-gaming-machines-crane-grabs.aspx

[u/vgf89]

I realized this with the tower of power arcade game and realized all similar games were the same. I found Stacker does the same, it'll always skip at the top unless you get there at the right time when no one else has won freaking in forever.

The incandescent bulbs on Cyclone hide the skipping effect way better than tower of power and Stacker though. If I hadn't played the other games I probably wouldn't have even realized the scam.

[u/RotYeti]

The changes to the music throughout the video are really good. Good content too.

[u/kayzingzingy]

Same thing with those block stacking games. Everytime I go to an arcade I win the major jackpot on the first try. If I try again it will always "slip" off after a clear delay of when I pushed it

[u/ImJstHrSoIWntGtFined]

Who would have thought arcade machines that have prizes would play on an uneven field? Shocking I tell you.