Tuesday, April 11, 2006

It's a fish

I sometimes wonder about those phone in competitions you get on telly, you know the sort of thing:

Which of these is an animal with four legs?

A) A dog
B) A fish

Obviously they're designed to be very easy on the basis more people are likely to call in (the logic there is somewhat flawed anyway but I won't get in to that now), but I do sometimes wonder if there are people out there who call up and then get the answer wrong. The law of averages says that at least 1 or 2 people out of the thousands of callers should get one wrong, but by the same token if enough monkeys called up a fairly high percentage would probably get the answer right too.

I'm not suggesting of course that monkeys do call up TV quiz lines (I'm sure they're not that interested in winning an HD camcorder or a Ford Focus), but I'd be interested to do an experiment to see who fared better: Monkeys, Students or Northeners. My money is on the monkeys.

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