Statistics of the Hidden Temple

Nineties nostalgia is so in right now around the blogosphere. My generation hit peak television-watching in the early to mid-nineties. Twenty years later, we're hitting our peak analytical-blogging years. Thus, the ultimate result of this alignment of the planets, the timing of our parents' unprotected sex, and the programing decisions of Nickelodeon executives is an ongoing explosion of blog posts about Legends of the Hidden Temple.

The theme music will be stuck your head all day. You're welcome!

They range from in-depth scene-by-scene analysis to candid interviews with past contestants to impassioned rants, but there are a few themes uniting them all.

You know what's coming next.

Let's get it out of the way right now: the Shrine of the Silver Monkey is not about getting the pieces in the right order. There's more to it than that. Look at this video: do you see how high those shelves are in relation to the kids reaching for them? Kids don't reach for the wrong piece first because they're stupid, kids reach for the wrong piece first because they can't see the fucking pieces. We in the audience see precisely which shelf holds the base of the statue, but from a kid's perspective, all they see is the underside of a shelf.

Another Silver Monkey challenge that's easy to overlook is that the contestant must assemble the statue facing away from herself. Thousands upon thousands of kids have memorized the diagram above, but remember that the contestant is looking at the monkey's less-familiar backside, and she can't walk around the statue to see how it looks from the front. If you put the monkey together the way it always looks on TV, you've put it together the wrong way.

And the fact that the head piece has that long stick that has to go through the whole monkey to hold it together? It essentially doubles the height of the statue for assembly purposes. If the contestant hasn't hit his growth spurt yet (remember, none of them is older than 14), he is straight fucked. Add in the heart-pounding adrenaline of the Temple environment, and you understand why so many kids end up knocking the pieces all over the place while their teammate screams at them.

Try putting that monkey together with THIS threat lurking in the shadows.

Despite its flaws, I fucking loved Legends of the Hidden Temple. That temple looked like the best playground imaginable. Forget Space Camp, I wanted to get on Legends of the Hidden Temple just to explore that thing! I always hoped that after filming was done for the day, the show's producers let all the kids chill out in the temple, whether they won or not. No time limit or Temple Guards, just twelve kids in color-coded T-shirts and gold helmets, bouncing around in the Pit of Despair and climbing all over the Swamp of Packing Peanuts or whatever they called it, having a good time. That would have been so awesome.

I should build a replica of the Hidden Temple and charge admission

I was going to study the failure rate for the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, get some real statistics on it to measure its true difficulty. The only problem is that there are 120 episodes of Legends, and while I would love to watch them all again, I don't quite have the time to gather the sort of data I would need. What I'd want to know is how many kids made it to the Shrine (it's possible to avoid it entirely), how many kids ran out of time while assembling the monkey, how long each kid spent assembling the monkey, and how monkey-assembly times affected the probability of success. Sadly, no one has collected this data.

What people have collected is data on the number of wins and losses, which teams made it to the Temple Run, and how many pendants each team took with them into the temple. Check out this lovely, detailed summary of all three seasons!




I completely forgot that Kirk Fogg existed. The way I remember it, Olmec hosted the show all by himself.

Even though all six teams were presumably equally matched, fans continue to assert that certain teams were more victorious than others. Popular opinion places the Purple Parrots in an especially unflattering light. On the other end of the spectrum, my favorite comment on the "Rembert Explains the 90s" article describes the Silver Snakes like this:

"So if this were the Hunger Games (and you can't prove that it wasn't), the Silver Snakes are clearly the District 1 or 2 kids. They were genetically engineered and trained from birth to bring BK RatchTechs back to their people."

Courtesy of Corinnely's Tumblr

Of course, the teams were randomly selected. Each team gets one boy and one girl between the ages of 11 and 14, and the only difference between the teams is T-shirt color. Theoretically, in 120 episodes, each team should have made it to the temple approximately 20 times. But did they really?

The Orange Iguanas made it into the Hidden Temple more often than any other team, but it's not quite a statistically significant lead. We can conduct a one-proportion hypothesis test using a Z distribution and the following hypotheses:

And it gives us a p-value of 0.09195. A p-value represents the likelihood that, in a world where the null hypothesis is true, we would observe a result equal to or more extreme than the one we got. In other words, if all six teams are truly equally matched, then there's about a 9% chance that the Orange Iguanas would make at least 25 out of 120 Temple Runs. Typically, we reject the null hypothesis (Orange Iguanas are just as good as everyone else) in favor of the alternative (Orange Iguanas are better than everyone else) only if our p-value is smaller than 5%-- that is, if the result we got is remarkable enough that we'd see it at most 5% of the time in a world where the null hypothesis is true. But the chance that Orange Iguanas just got lucky is a little over 9%, so I wouldn't reject the null hypothesis in their case.

Sadly, when the alternative hypothesis above is switched to p < 1/6, the Purple Parrots yield a p-value of 0.01393, or about 1%. They are statistically significantly worse than average at making it into Olmec's awesome playground.



These fine ladies are still among the best cosplayers in existence, though.

But whether or not you got to enter the Hidden Temple isn't the only measure of success on Legends of the Hidden Temple. To win, a two-person team must enter the temple, retrieve the "historical" artifact, and make it back out in under three minutes. Famously, only 32 out of 120 episodes ended in victory, for an overall rate of 26.7%. Even in the episodes where two kids made it to Space Camp, there were ten other kids weeded out in the earlier challenges who went home with nothing more than a VHS tape or a pair of moon shoes. So out of 1,440 contestants to enter the show, only 64 ever claimed its ultimate prize-- a win rate of just over 4%. Legends of the Hidden Temple was incredibly hard for a kid to win.

There are a couple ways to judge victory here. The Green Monkeys and Silver Snakes are tied for number of artifacts found and for number of artifacts successfully removed from the Hidden Temple. Because the Silver Snakes made fewer total Temple Runs than the Green Monkeys, their winning percentage is a little better-- given that a Silver Snake has made it to the Temple, she stands a slightly better chance of bringing out the artifact than an otherwise identical Green Monkey. But I'm not sure that the Silver Snakes deserve the top rank just because the Green Monkeys made three more Temple Runs-- after all, getting to the Temple is a daunting challenge in itself. I consider the two tied for most successful team.



Somehow, this teaches you about history?

If we assume that any given team has about a 26.7% chance of winning once they make it to the Temple, then we can perform more hypothesis tests to determine if certain teams were significantly better or worse at making the Temple Run. The Orange Iguanas, though they made the most attempts of any team, recovered only 4 artifacts over the course of the show. Using another one-proportion hypothesis test for percentage of successful Temple Runs out of the team's total, we find that the Orange Iguanas rack up a p-value of 0.003494. Their winning percentage is statistically significantly worse than if we assumed all teams were equally matched. One might say that the Orange Iguanas are the best at the Temple Games that determine which team gets the opportunity to do the Temple Run, but they are clearly not the best at completing the temple itself.



The Steps of Knowledge, or more appropriately, The Steps of Not Spacing Out for Five Minutes while a Foam Head Literally Tells You The Answers. Forget the Shrine of the Silver Monkey-- a kid who drops out on the steps of knowledge is an unredeemable dumbass in my book.

The bitterest of defeats were those where the team who entered the temple would make it to their artifact, but fail to make it out of the temple in time. Once a contestant picks up their artifact, all the previously locked doors in the temple open, and all lurking Temple Guards are banished (thank GOD). At that point, it's all about speed. This kid has already passed the mental and physical tests of the Temple Games and solved the riddles of the Temple itself, now all he has to do is scramble back out without losing his grip on his little prop-department artifact before the timer counts down to zero. To fail at this point is like reaching the summit of Everest but getting stuck in a crevasse and freezing to death on the way back down.

Here, the previously unremarkable Blue Barracudas make a name for themselves. If a Blue Barracuda gets her hands on Abe Lincoln's Stovepipe Hat or the Severed Head of Anne Boleyn or whatever, she is gonna make it out of that temple. The Blue Barracudas may not have made many successful Temple Runs, but by God when they were on the way to victory they did not fuck it up in the endgame. Granted, the sample size is so small (the Blue Barracudas only ever reached six artifacts) that the result is not statistically significant, but I think it's worth noting that the Barracudas live up to the speediness of their namesake.

There's also the matter of how many Pendants of Life a team brings into the temple on their run. The Temple Games, aside from determining which team gets to enter Olmec's temple, decide how many Pendants of Life each team gets. If you encounter a Temple Guard, the only thing that can save you is to give him one of your Pendants of Life. This was an important way to teach kids about how muggings work.



Take my money just please oh god don't kill me

The games award a total of 2 pendants in increments of one half-pendant at a time. A half-pendant is useless, but the show's announcer promised that there was another half-pendant hidden somewhere in the Temple and that if you found it, your now-whole pendant would successfully appease the Temple Guards. I don't remember anybody ever finding the damn hidden half-pendant-- as if the kids needed one more thing to keep in mind while scrambling through that maze-- but there was at least a theoretical purpose to taking half a pendant into the Temple with you.

The Orange Iguanas hold the record for total number of pendants gained (since they just won the Temple Games so many times), but you might be surprised as to which team brought the most pendants into the Temple with them on average:

That's right: finally, a category where the Purple Parrots take the lead! When a Parrot enters that temple, rare as that might be, he goes in PREPARED. Ain't no Temple Guards gonna stop him.

Of course, entering the Temple with the maximum two Pendants of Life might not actually be a boon. To come up with my null hypothesis in that chart, I started from the idea that the two teams competing in the Temple Games are equally matched. The first two games award half a pendant each, and the third awards one whole pendant. There's a 25% chance that one team will win all the games and enter the Temple with two pendants, a 50% chance that the winning team enters the Temple with 1.5 pendants (the losing team having gained half a pendant during the games), and a 25% chance that both teams earn one whole pendant and Olmec has to ask a tiebreaking question to determine which team makes the run. But that's not how it shakes out.

Ultimately, 53 of the 120 teams to make the Temple Run entered with two pendants, and 52 entered with 1.5 pendants. Tiebreakers were rare. Only 15 teams ever entered the Temple with just one Pendant of Life, having buzzed in first with the right answer to Olmec's tiebreaker question. Of those 15 teams, 6 went on to victory-- a 40% success rate, as opposed to the 25% success rate of teams who won definitively in the Temple Games and took more pendants into the Temple. The sample sizes are too small to say that making a Temple Run on one pendant gives contestants a statistically significant advantage, but that doesn't stop me from making a theory about it.



A theory? HHMMMmmmmmmm!

Legends of the Hidden Temple is supposed to be a game where the most well-rounded competitors win. The first challenge of every show is the moat, a test of physical skill, problem-solving, and teamwork. Six teams enter the moat, and the first four across advance to the Steps of Knowledge. While most of the questions asked on the Steps are basic recall about the story that Olmec just told-- with multiple-choice answers to boot-- the Steps are supposedly a test of intellect. Four teams enter, two teams advance to the challenges of the Temple Games.

 

So, at this point, we have two teams that are theoretically matched in terms of teamwork, problem-solving, and smarts. The Temple Games then determine who is truly best prepared to enter the Temple. But the skills that determine success in the Temple Games aren't the same ones you need to succeed in the Temple itself-- each Temple Game has one clear objective that doesn't change, and they tend to favor the physically stronger competitor. The Temple itself certainly requires some physical dexterity, but the real challenge is in the constantly changing objectives. The Temple has SO MANY ROOMS, and each door has a different mechanism to open. Individually, each room is easy-- sit on the right throne, say the right password, stick the torch in the right podium-- but the kid making his way through the course has to correctly complete each objective in quick succession, adapting to unexpected obstacles, all while in constant, heart-pounding fear of the Temple Guards.

 

Seriously, there are no words to describe the terror. (artist credit)

 

The super-athletic team that easily trumps their competitors in the Temple Games may not have the quick-wittedness or cool-headedness required to succeed in the Temple proper. But when the Temple Games result in a tie, the team who enters is the one that thinks more quickly than the other. The tiebreaking question is usually about the story that Olmec told, but unlike the Steps of Knowledge, there are no multiple-choice answers and the facts aren't quite as fresh in the contestants' memories as before. A tiebreaker rewards information recall, quick thinking, and confidence in the face of uncertainty-- all the most important skills for beating the Temple. So, even though a team might be bringing the fewest possible Pendants of Life into the Temple and thus minimizing their chances of surviving a Temple Guard encounter, they've already demonstrated that they're better-prepared for the challenge than a team that wins the Temple Games outright. And so they beat the Temple more often.

 

Theoretically, of course. There weren't nearly enough tiebreakers to make a statistically significant judgment on the matter.

 

In conclusion, I learned two important facts while researching this article: Space Camp is totally still around and it's for grown-ups too, and you can buy adult-sized versions of the Legends team shirts. It's a wonderful time to have grown up in the 90's.