Patterns in Lottery Numbers 563
markmcb writes "Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, i.e., random numbers are selected and people guess what they will be for a cash prize. But how random are the numbers? Matt Vea has conducted a pattern analysis of the MegaMillions lottery, which recently offered a sum of $370M (USD) to the winner. Matt shows that the lottery isn't as random as it may seem and that there are 'better' choices than others to be made when selecting numbers. From the article, 'A single dollar in MegaMillions purchases a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of landing the jackpot ... a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers.'" Includes some excellent charts of his analysis.
Re:And yet, one truth escapes the analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of using absolute dollar figures for your analysis, you should use lifestyle impact.
e.g. One dollar a week == no lifestyle impact; $370MM payout == off the charts lifestyle impact.
This is why people will continue to play the lottery, even if mathematically it's a poor choice.
Lottery vs. poker (Score:3, Interesting)
Fl. lottery... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I'm not a math guy, but I *know* that all 50whatever balls aren't identical. Should there be some (very) slight preference for a particular ball, or set of balls, over a series of draws over time? I seem to remember an article in a Dragon magazine about dice and using math to find out if yours had a preference for a particular number...
Re:How about ANY random numbers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You can't lose if you don't play (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the slogans for the Illinois lottery used to be "you can't win if you don't play", but I figured every time I didn't play, I won $1. Its both stupid and ironic that many of the same people bitching about taxes pay this voluntary tax!
At the astronomical odds against winning, I figure my chances of finding a winning ticket on the ground are only marginally worse than my chances of buying a winning ticket. So rather than give extra money to the government so it will be funnelled to politically connected rich people, I just watch the ground.
I play the Mega Millions every time the numbers are drawn. We have a standing office pool with 4 of us, and we play 4 numbers every time the balls are dropped, the same 4 sets of numbers each time.
What have we won? Well, one time we won $150. But aside from that, we know that the lotto money goes into the public school system. So, in effect, I'm donating $8 - $9 minus administrative fees to the school system every month.
I'm ok with that.
And on the off chance that I ever win the lotto, none of you will ever hear from my fat ass again.
~Wx
Re:Missing data (Score:5, Interesting)
College stats course (Score:5, Interesting)
What stuck with me though we a couple of ideas:
Re:I've known people that used patterns (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounds like a classic case where someone is staying just ahead of Gambler's Ruin [wikipedia.org]--so far. If you don't properly model what happens when you run out of money, there are any number of gambling systems that seem like they work in the short-term, but in reality don't if you run them long enough. The simplest one is the Martingale [wikipedia.org].
An interesting lotto winner story (Score:1, Interesting)
He blew every cent he earned playing football on drugs and was arrested on sex and drug charges. When he was broke he found religion and got cleaned up. Later, he hit the lottery for $28 million.
My first question (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at statistical weighting of ball frequency in a huge aggregate is fine. But I'm guessing (but not betting) you can't translate it directly into predictions in the short term, because of this random set issue. Now, if you want to make multiple analyses based on the specific historical performance of each set, then you have something more practical. But then you need to buy multiple sets of tickets based on the multiple predictions you get. I don't think his data source will tell him what ball set was used.
(Early on, when Lotto Texas was new, I used to guess 2 or 3 of the numbers based on simple frequency analysis, in every single drawing. But they kept adding ball sets. And Texas did tell people which ball set they used. After the fact, of course. And then I think they changed the number of balls picked. So I gave up my paper trials.)
If your office mates win, and you're not in it... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not gambling, it's "gloating ex-co-worker insurance."
Lottery and the Mob (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game [wikipedia.org]
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/underground/1114undergroundpm.html [publicradio.org]
Re:You can't lose if you don't play (Score:5, Interesting)
They try to encourage people to play the lottery by telling them the money all goes to schools. So they direct the whole of lottery income to the schools, on paper. But the school budget is planned in budget meetings, and the ammount the lottery brings in has no effect on school budgets. For every extra dollar brought in by the lottery, that's one less dollar of general fund money that goes to the schools, and one more dollar of total money in the government's general fund.
They can write out the accounting anyway they like to and say, "see, these dollars went here," but dollars are fungible. At the end of the day, the acid test to see if it means anything to say "lottery money goes to schools" is to see what the marginal effect on school funding is of purchasing lottery tickets. That effect is 0.
Re:And yet, one truth escapes the analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically it buys you a dream, and an opportunity to share your dreams with your friends/co-workers who are in on the ticket. Really no different from buying a piece of art for a conversation piece.
At work, we buy lottery tickets together when the jackpot is huge, and then we get to talk about the things we'd do if we won, which in effect buys me a mental vacation from the reality of having to work for a living. For a dollar every now and then, it's worth it. Besides, a losing ticket just buys social assistance projects where I'm from anyways, so it's not really a big loss.
Re:And yet, one truth escapes the analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but for less than one dollar a day (that's less than the cost of a cup of coffee), you can help change a child's life. Imagine the feeling of joy you'll get when you receive a personalized card in the mail from the child you sponsor. Call the number on your screen right now to make a donation.
Turned out the kid had been dead for years. Someone kept collecting the money, though, and wrote letters.
Interesting scam based on that (Score:5, Interesting)
Pick some random stock, send email to 2*10 suckers that it will go up, and to an equal number of suckers that it will go down.
Whichever direction it moves, divide that batch of suckers in two, pick some other random stock, send half email taht it will go up and half email that it goes down.
Repeat until you have only a few suckers left. They will see you as a genius who has correctly predicted the last {n} stock moves correctly. It may be the final sucker, or the last 2, or 4, etc.
Now tout a stock you have just bought and make some money!
Re:How about ANY random numbers? (Score:3, Interesting)
One method is to take each pair in the sequence as coordinates in a plane and plot them.
Eg, you have a dripping tap. You take the time between drips as your number. Then two successive intervals get plotted on a plane and you can start finding a resulting pattern.
I once did this with pseudo-random number generators as provided with various libraries.
The results were interesting.
Each different PRNG would produce a distinct pattern and the same pattern every single time regardless of whether you initiated with a different seed value. Its like a fingerprint; you look at the resulting pattern and you can say which PRNG produced it.
This was in the '90s and the Borland 'turbo pascal' PRNG produced a pattern that looked a LOT like a space-shuttle