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