Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by flexd on Sunday August 22, 2010 @03:38PM
(#1625115)
I kind of like the high number and how long it will take to find a "winner". Allows whoever wins to spread word about something they want (hopefully something clever) and it will be there for a while. The website would lose its meaning if the winner changed every day.
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by DLWormwood on Sunday August 22, 2010 @04:29PM
(#1625203)
Not necessarily. Just like the lottery, it is possible (maybe even likely) that having about a million hits in a day will have periods where nobody wins for a few days, or that a winner might happen two or three times in one day. I’ve forgotten my college statistics, but I believe there are permutation or combination equations that would explain this concept simply in symbolic terms.
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by shin_lao on Sunday August 22, 2010 @04:30PM
(#1625205)
Depends.
Do you roll a random number from a generator until it matches the displayed number?
If yes, if you have 1,000,000 visitors per day, the probability of having a winner is around 63 %.
However, if your random number generator guarantees that each player gets a different number then yes, the probability of having a winner approaches 100% as you get closer to the millionth visitor.
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by jacquesm on Sunday August 22, 2010 @03:30PM
(#1625096)
I am currently one in 7 billion if you want to be precise, but for that website to work you'd have to have enough traffic to make someone a winner every now and then. At the current traffic rates that's going to be too long between winners to make it work. Most likely 30 days from now that homepage will look the same as it does today.
So take it down a few orders of magnitude, reserve the other domains and build it up from there, switch to higher magnitude domains as appropriate.
I can see a slight problem with botnet herders gaming the system too.
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by codyrobbins on Sunday August 22, 2010 @03:42PM
(#1625122)
There’s no cookie so I assume you’re restricting it to one entry per day based on IP. Could somebody ruin the whole thing by flooding the server with requests with spoofed IP addresses?
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by MichaelGG on Sunday August 22, 2010 @04:12PM
(#1625175)
If someone in a position to fully establish TCP connections with spoofed IPs wanted to ruin something, I'd think they'd find something a lot more interesting to do...
Re:Are You 1 in 1,000,000?
by daok on Sunday August 22, 2010 @03:28PM
(#1625091)
Once you have submit, you can refresh the page. This won't regenerate a number but increase the loser or number count. I guess it's a bug because once some one will win, the guy could just keep refreshing and increase the count of Win by a lot... and for the moment it's pretty easy to increment the count of loss just by refreshing the wrong value.
Do you roll a random number from a generator until it matches the displayed number?
If yes, if you have 1,000,000 visitors per day, the probability of having a winner is around 63 %.
However, if your random number generator guarantees that each player gets a different number then yes, the probability of having a winner approaches 100% as you get closer to the millionth visitor.
So take it down a few orders of magnitude, reserve the other domains and build it up from there, switch to higher magnitude domains as appropriate.
I can see a slight problem with botnet herders gaming the system too.
I tried with new browser sessions, with HTTP cookies and Flash cookies cleared all to no avail.
I even tried: curl -d "" http://www.areyou1in1000000.com/
There's either some really good or really bad duplicate entry prevention going on.
Probably IP + User Agent.
Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."
One drop of sperm contains hundreds of millions of spermatozoa.
So the answer is no. I am not one in a million. I am much less likely than that.
Not that it makes me special in any kind of way, it's not as if I was the only one.