Jessica Simpson, along with the Muppets, stars in a commercial for Pizza Hut’s new 4forAll Pizza. Here’s a description of the commercial taken from the Pizza Hut press release:

The commercial features The Muppets in a heated debate about which pizza topping to order. For example, Kermit the Frog wants green toppings, Animal wants meat and Miss Piggy is a vegetarian. Jessica Simpson enters the scene and stuns The Muppets with the brainy answer, “Why not the 4forALL Pizza? It has more than 18 possible toppings… which gives you more than six million topping options,” leaving them completely speechless. Awestruck by Simpson’s ironic mathematic acumen, Miss Piggy pretends to have known this all along. The pizza arrives, Jessica reaches for a slice but Miss Piggy pulls the pizza box away from Jessica and says, “Beauty before brains.”

Now, let’s carefully consider the total number of options. Each of the four pizzas is allowed up to four toppings, and there are a total of 18 toppings to choose from. Assuming no repeated toppings, there are 18 choose 4, or 3060, possibilities for each individual pizza. Since there are four pizzas, the total number of overall options on the 4forAll is 3060 choose 4, or approximately 3.6 trillion. This is assuming that no two pizzas are identical and that no pizzas have repeated toppings (e.g. extra cheese, double pepperoni). If we discard these two assumptions the number of possible combinations is even greater! So although Jessica was technically correct when she stated that there were “more than six million topping options,” this is a pretty crappy estimate — it’s off by six orders of magnitude. This is particularly embarrassing given that the commercial’s main “joke” was Jessica’s “ironic mathematic acumen.”