Everyone has either heard of, or seen a slot machine, but where did they originate? The first Slot Machine ever to be made was the Liberty Bell, built by Charles Fe in 1895. It had three reels and four symbols. The symbols were a heart, a spade, a diamond, and the Liberty Bell. If you spun, and landed all three Liberty Bells at once, you would get the maximum payout of fifty cents. Charles Fe's slot machines were becoming famous and were in high demand. Many gambling companies offered to buy the rights of the machine off of him but he refused. In 1907, a man named Herbert Mills began a knockoff version of the Liberty Bell and added the fruit symbols we commonly see today. Slot Machine production continued, as people integrated more and more computers into the slot machines. One day, in 1984, a man named Inge Telnaes revolutionized the slot machine industry. He added a computer chip into the slot machine. This chip was a random number generator. The effect of this chip is that it made the odds of winning a jackpot much much less, even making it possible for someone to watch you play and change the odds of you winning. The probability of you getting the jackpot is exactly the same, however, whoever is watching that machine could easily make it so that you only got it one in every one-hundred-thousand times. This computer chip method is used in modern slot machines today.
In order to find the probability of a slot machine, you need to know how many symbols there are per wheel as well as how many wheels. Let's find the probability of winning the jackpot on the Liberty Bell.
Reels=3 1.) Count the reels
4*4*4=56 3.) Raise the number symbols to the power of the number of reels
The probability of winning a jackpot on the Liberty Bell is 1/56.
Pricing and Winning:
The payout you see on a slot machine is not determined by how many people have played; it is purely determined by chance. In a modern day casino, if the probability was 1/56, the jackpot would be about 56 dollars. This seems strange, if the probability says you will win one in 56 times, and the jackpot is 56 dollars, how do they make any money? The answer to this question is all in the hidden computer chip. The computer chip could easily turn the odds of 1/56 to 1/1000. You may ask, 'who in their right minds would play a game that many times?' Well one solution casinos have developed is to give you small payouts. If someone is on the verge of quitting and they win five dollars, odds are they will probably get right back at it.
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