Every now and then I feel like doing a Gasarchian post. This is one of those weeks. I’m going to look at the mathematics behind the American game show Family Feud and the British Pointless. I caught a glimpse of Pointless while I was in Oxford over the summer and then got hooked for a while on old episodes on YouTube.
In both shows, 100 people are surveyed to give elements in a category, like “Robert Redford Films” and you get points based on how many people match the player’s or team’s answer. After that the similarity ends. In Family Feud you want to maximize your points, in Pointless you want to get as few as possible.
In Family Feud the categories are vague and not fact checked. If you say “The Hustler” and five other people said “The Hustler” you would get five points, even though Redford did not appear in that film. The only sanity check is that you need at least two matches to get points. The questions are often humorous or risqué like “Things people do right before going to sleep”.
In Pointless if you said “The Hustler” you would get 100 points for a wrong answer. To define wrong answers, the category has to have a very formal definition: “Any movie where Robert Redford has a credited role released before 2023. TV movies and documentaries do not count. Voice-over animated films do count.”
Pointless often has British-based questions. I can’t name any professional darts players but apparently there are several famous ones in the UK.
Other differences: In Family Feud, each person surveyed gives one answer. In Pointless, each person surveyed has 100 seconds to give as many answers as they can. Family Feud ends with a quick round of five categories where two players need to get 200 points total. Pointless ends where the 2-player team needs to find a pointless answer in a category.
How would AI do in these shows? I asked ChatGPT to come up with an obscure Robert Redford movie and it came up with a good one, Situation Hopeless — But Not Serious and for a popular one Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When I asked “give me one thing people do before they go to sleep” it gave me “check their phones”. AI wants us to think the last thing we should do at night is talk to AI.
Family Feud has a British version named Family Fortunes. A US version of Pointless never got past the pilot. We’re not a country that likes to aim for zero.
