Thanks to this site, I now hate monkeys
Written: Oct 24 '00
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Okay, so perhaps I'm being a little bit overdramatic -- I hated monkeys long before I had ever visited this site. That notwithstanding, Treeloot.com is a total disgrace of a website. Not only does it fail miserably from a prize-winning standpoint, but it's both relatively boring and extremely irritating as well.
For those of you who haven't had the misfortune of visiting the site yet, the idea behind Treeloot.com is relatively simple. A large image-map of a tree is displayed on your screen, and the object is to click on a particular point in which you think money might be hidden. If we are to believe that there is actually any money hidden anywhere within the monstrous tree, it is located at certain locations which change at intervals ranging from about 45 minutes to 24 hours. Although many people have challenged whether or not there are actually any prizes located in the tree at all, I believe that there are; my explanation follows.
The locations of the prizes are based on a simple Cartesian coordinate system. It's basically the same type of thing you learned about in high school Algebra class -- you know, X and Y and all that. The tree graphic seems to be roughly 500 x 500 pixels, which would yield a total of about 250,000 distinct pixels. Some of this space, let's say about 20 percent, is blank space and known not to contain any prizes. So, that leaves us with about 200,000 possible locations on which one can click.
Some prizes can be won with one correct click to the exact pixel which has been designated as holding that prize. These are the smaller prizes, seemingly around $1,000 or less. Based on the estimates in the last paragraph, one would have about a 1/200,000 chance of winning any given prize. This is at least possible (although extremely unlikely, of course), but it's made even more unlikely by the fact that even these prizes move every 24 hours.
The larger prizes, however, are almost statistically impossible to win. As opposed to being able to win with a single click, in order to win these prizes one must click on two exact and distinct pixels, one right after the other. For those of you who aren't well-versed in probability, I believe that the chance of winning one of these prizes is roughly 1/40,000,000,000. Yes, I realize that these are unbelievably, extraordinarily, terribly tiny odds. Yes, I realize that one statistically stands a much better chance of winning the state lottery than of winning one of these large prizes. And yes, I realize that this seems so impossible that it must be an error -- otherwise, why would people continue to flock to this awful site?
It must be the cute monkeys.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
basilisk4
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Location: Atlanta, GA
Reviews written: 233
Trusted by: 214 members
About Me:
Soon-to-be married 26-year-old lawyer who likes electronics, computers, and cars.
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