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Join today<\/a><\/p>\n \n Already a member? Your support helps us to tell the story<\/p>\n From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.<\/p>\n At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.<\/p>\n The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.<\/p>\n Your support makes all the difference.Read more<\/p>\n Celebrity Traitors<\/a> is set to have a contestant unlike any before, with mathematician Professor Hannah Fry bringing her statistical expertise to the game in a bid to sniff out the suspicious contestants.<\/p>\n Self-described \u201ctoxically competitive\u201d Fry, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, is also a presenter on several BBC<\/a> TV and radio shows, including The Secret Genius of Modern Life.<\/p>\n Ahead of filming Celebrity Traitors earlier this year, Fry revealed that she used her knowledge of statistics to prepare for her appearance. <\/p>\n The professor went back through all previous seasons of the show to \u201ctry and find statistically significant patterns\u201d in a process not dissimilar from \u201cthe same bit of math that Alan Turing used to crack the Enigma machine\u201d \u2013 a cipher device used by the German military during World War II. <\/p>\n Fry told the BBC that she identified a pattern in the way that the assigned Traitors behave, including the fact that they \u201coften do a burn vote\u201d in the first few episodes when they\u2019re settling in to throw suspicion on somebody random. <\/p>\n She called it \u201cjust one example of a little bit of maths that I’ve got in my back pocket\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cWhether it\u2019s going to work or not, honestly, your guess is as good as mine!\u201d she said. \u201cI’ve got spreadsheets coming out of my eyeballs. I close my eyes and it’s like there are numbers tattooed on the inside of my eyelids at the moment for how much I’ve been looking at them.\u201d<\/p>\n Fry acknowledged that a big wrinkle in her plan is how bad the Faithfuls often are at detecting the Traitors. \u201cThey are so all over the place that it’s really hard to pick out what the signal is,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n One of Fry\u2019s fellow contestants, comedian James Acaster, said he was most fearful of Fry<\/a> as she \u201cwill probably tell you that probability-wise, there\u2019s most likely to be at least one comic chosen as a Traitor because there\u2019s enough of us\u201d. <\/p>\n
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‘Celebrity Traitors’ contestant Professor Hannah Fry (Getty Images)<\/p>\n