The Singled Out Game
Kennan Shelton · Mathematics Magazine · 2005
In the mid 1990s, the cable music video channel MTV produced Singled Out, a game show in which fifty men competed to win a date with a single woman (for gender equity, the second half of the show featured fifty women vying for one man). Through a series of elimination stages—most of them embarrassing to the contestants—the field of potential suitors was reduced to only three. To determine the winner from the final three contestants, the woman was presented with a series of either/or questions. Each man attempted to guess the woman’s answer and those who guessed correctly took one step toward the woman. The winner was the man to take five steps and reach the woman. (A tie-breaker round was used if necessary.) Much of the time the men seemed to have no idea what answers the woman chose. I myself had no clue what she might answer—it seemed to me that she was simply flipping a coin to make her decision. The interesting feature of the show was how the men announced their guesses. They were arranged in a fixed order and each in turn announced his guess so that the others could hear. Thus it was possible for the second and third men to modify their choices