On Delusional Dreams

Oh, but what a dream. Up for auction is an insane mother of a car, the BMW 2003 M3 CSL. It's a lightened version of the already awesome M3, or as Jeremy Clarkson puts it, "it's a BMW with bulimia". The interesting part of this auction is how absolutely impossible it is: Pick the lowest unique bid.

This seems worse than a regular raffle. In a normal raffle, at least you have 1 in 'n' chance to win, where 'n' is the number of people. But in this new game, there are many more hurdles in front of you.

First you have to choose the lowest number. This isn't too hard to visualize; Simply order all incoming bids and choose the first one. Easy-peasey.

Unfortunately, there's also the matter of uniqueness. This means that even if you had chosen the lowest number, you still won't likely get the car since lots of other people probably picked the same number. You could choose a number with more digits to be more random, but then you're putting yourself further and further away from the lowest number. Psychologically, it's a catch-22. Choose a low number to get the LOWEST number, but choose a HIGH enough one to be unique.

What a fun and diabolical concept :)