Survivors Finale

Quoting the prediction by Arnold Lettieri: "... the season finale of the popular CBS-TV show, "Survivor," which has an expected audience of 40 million souls, will yield a small positive deviation of composite Chi-square from expectation, with a peak somewhere between 2000 and 2200 EST, the time slot for this program."

Although this prediction was US-centric, for the purpose of learning I decided to accept it as a formal prediction, which would be treated as a global event in the same spirit as certain US political and sports events have been. The formal prediction was for a cumulative deviation of chisquare during the two-hour period of the show, using one-second resolution, and the expectation was assigned as low or medium, since experience indicates that this general category of US-centric, and media-oriented events does not usually yield a large deviation.

There were 26 eggs reporting at this time, 11 of which were in the US. The formal prediction does indeed show a small peak early on, as shown in the following figure, but the composite value steadily declines to a culmination somewhat lower than expectation, with Chisquare of 7145.1 on 7200 df, and a corresponding probability of about 0.6.

Survivors Finale

Since the primary interest would be in the US, an exploratory look at the results for the 11 US eggs only is shown in the following figure. It is very similar in form to the global composite, with a slightly lower final value.

Survivors Finale, US only


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