Twitter saves Amazing Race contestants

Las Vegas showgirl contestants who lost a passport on the first leg of 'The Amazing Race'

I haven't seen the point of Twitter in the past. It seems like a bunch of random shouts into cyberspace. (Unlike this blog which is a somewhat less random shout into cyberspace that uses a lot more words) but I saw it save a couple of contestants of The Amazing Race on Sunday.

The pair of Las Vegas showgirls dropped one of their passports in a gas station parking lot on the way to the airport. Amazingly, they not only discovered that they had done so but figured out where they dropped it and went back to the scene. Unfortunately they asked around at the gas station to no avail; nobody had seen their lost passport. What to do? Lost passports have always meant immediate eliminations to teams on previous seasons.

They chose to go to the airport anyway, hoping that the passport was being brought to them there. Not a bad choice. Whenever a plan goes awry, the best bet is, if you can't pick up the lost thread, continue with the original plan by moving to the next step. 

After the brief meltdown and recriminations in the airport, they got some fantastic news. Someone had indeed found their passport and brought it to the airport. But why they did so is the real story here.

The man who found the passport is a Twitter user who posted that he had been briefly filmed on Amazing Race and had found the passport.

So #TheLife gets crazier so after being randomly filmed on amazing

race I see that one of them dropped there passport. (sic)

Some Amazing Race super fan picked up his post on an RSS feed and realized the importance of this information. She replied to Storms that the contestant needs the passport and directed him to get it to the airport so she could continue with her race.

Meanwhile producers found the post in Taiwan, the next destination, and sent word to LAX to warn the host that he may not need to perform an early elimination after all.

Check out the details in this article.

Risk Management on Amazing Race

On this last leg of The Amazing Race, the contestants had to fly from Sydney to Tokyo. When arriving at the airport they were faced with a choice of two flights:

1. Fly direct to Tokyo, arriving at 6:15 AM
2. Fly via Hong Kong, arriving at 6:00 AM

This generated a lot of discussion with most teams opting for the less risky flight. But then, after more thought, a few teams changed their minds and opted for the flight with a connection. It sounded like a bad idea to take that risk for a possible 15 minute savings on a 12 hour flight. So I had to analyze it using classic Risk Management techniques.

First we need one assumption. Let's make one with what seems to be my luck and about what I've seen watching this show: 20% chance of any flight of that length being 2 hours late.

What we do in this simple analysis is run both scenarios and total up the arrival times. 6:15 plus 20% of an extra 120 minutes = 6:39 AM arrival time.
Now let's compare this to the flight with a connection scenario.

When you add another flight to this equation you get slightly more complicated math but still doable. Arrival time is 6:00 plus a 32% chance of adding 120 minutes plus a 4% chance of adding 240 minutes = 6:48 AM

So, if my 20% assumption was correct, the smart move was to take the direct flight.
How did it work out for our teams? Check it out below at about minute 10.

Episode 3 2011

One of the flights ends up being delayed by an hour and twenty minutes. It's fun to use risk management in real life.