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September 5, 2008

Strange But True!

Q. Let's say you've played your share of lotteries in the past but have gotten tired of losing. Now your daughter is infatuated with a game called MongaMillions, with a one-in-100-million chance of winning, and has started sinking in plenty of her hard-earned bucks. How might you use a “guesstimate gambit” to help her break her habit?

A. To make her gamble more graphic to her, you set out to compute the height of a stack of all possible tickets, assuming there are in fact 100 million different ones, say Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam in “Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin.” While it's hard to gauge the thickness of a single lottery ticket, try instead for the thickness of a packet of 52 tickets, which is close to that of a pack of 52 playing cards, or about 1 centimeter. This would put the thickness of one ticket at about .0002 meter. Next multiply .0002 times 100,000,000 tickets and you get roughly 20 kilometers, or 15 miles.


 
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