We have all already tried our luck in tempting competitions, with gifts each crazier than the last. Despite my numerous participations, I had only won one interesting prize, which had discouraged me somewhat, especially for competitions with subsidiary questions.
But this time, I decided to innovate and use Google's AI, Gemini. And the least we can say is that it paid off!
Carrefour and ScanMania
Before diving into the heart of the matter, I would like to clarify that this article is not sponsored by Carrefour Belgium. My only goal is to share the method I used and to highlight the help that AI gave me, without which I would not have won.
To put it simply, the Carrefour Belgium competition consisted of obtaining participation vouchers during my purchases in store. Then, we had to answer a “classic” question and a subsidiary question: “What will be the number of participants in the competition the week of…?”. Every week, for five weeks, a 250g gold bar (value approximately €20,000), 10 travel vouchers of €1,500 on Carrefour Voyages and bonus points equivalent to €5 were at stake.
My strategy
Rather than participating every week with the few vouchers I received, I preferred to wait until the last week and group my participation vouchers together to maximize my chances.
Finding the answers to “classic” questions was child's play thanks to Google. The real challenge was the subsidiary question. If I could have found the number of participants from previous weeks, I could have applied a simple mathematical distribution with 50% responses above and 50% below responses from previous weeks. Impossible to get hold of this information. My objective was therefore to determine a range of attendees and divide it by the number of tickets in my possession.
The subsidiary question, the eternal enigma
Ah, the famous subsidiary question! The one that frustrates us so much, because it's almost impossible to get any idea of the answer.
I regularly participate in online competitions, but I never win when there is a subsidiary question. My victories are limited to small prizes during draws, such as cinema tickets for a preview. Nice, but nothing to dream about!
Not knowing at all what to answer to the subsidiary question, I started by searching on Google and on forums specializing in competitions. Nothing, no leads! It looks like this kind of information is “top secret”.
Gemini to the rescue
That's where my new friend, Gemini, Google's AI, came into play.
I started by submitting a very simple prompt (see image below). As you can see, Gemini didn't answer my question on the first try (which often happens when first trying an AI). Sometimes you have to insist a little or rephrase his request to obtain satisfactory answers.
Even though Gemini didn't answer my question directly, his answer was to the point. He needed more information to help me. So I answered the questions in the red box, then I asked him again to give me a range of the number of participants.
And there, bingo! I finally got the answer that would allow me to move forward.. And believe me, it was very far from what I would have given as an answer (I would have said between 2000 and 7000 participants… suffice to say that I am terrible at estimating).
The final calculation
With this estimate in hand, all I had to do was perform a few calculations to obtain the slice to add between each answer and play all my tickets.
For those who did not understand the calculation, if the range had been 10,000 to 100,000 participants, the calculation would have been: (100,000 – 10,000) / number of tickets = X.
If X = 307, I had to play 10,000 then 10,307 then 10,614 and so on.
If it's not clear and you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me in the comments, I'll be happy to answer them.
I had already used this method for another competition five or six years ago. The subsidiary question was “simpler”, and I was able to find clues on Google, which allowed me to win a prize of €1,000.
The verdict
First of all, thank you to those who read the article to the end! I hope this technique will be useful to you (for a competition in which I will not be participating, of course).
I didn't win the €20,000 gold bar, but I won a €1,500 travel voucherwhich is the best prize I have ever won!
AI, a revolution in progress
The objective of this article is not (only) to share my joy and ask you for advice for my next vacation, but to show the power of AI.
I'm not claiming to have won thanks to Gemini (another AI might have done just as well, but it's the one I use most often), but without AI I would have played a bad fork and won a good one. of 5€.
I regularly use AI in my private life (translation, spell checking, writing emails, organizing city trips) and professional life (correcting/optimizing computer scripts, creating complex formulas in Excel, writing emails). emails).
In my opinion, AI is a major revolution, just like the Internet, and we are only at the beginning. We must not be afraid of it, on the contrary, we must learn to live in its company and benefit from it.
