Negative Numbers Are Hard

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[Moozik: The Mission - Stay With Me]

They are. They bloody well are. Not convinced? Well Camelot pulled a scratch card in the UK because it's too confusing.

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.


The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.

We're doomed.

2 Comments

I'm afraid Idiocracy (http://imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) won't take 500 years to get here...

Seth Wagoner said:

Cough. Cough. Splutter. Well, I guess this sort of explains how Bush can get away with telling his base "The economy is in *great* shape, don't listen to those whining liberal idiots!"

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This page contains a single entry by kev published on November 18, 2007 9:15 PM.

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