Statistician Cracks Code For Lottery Tickets 374
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, an MIT educated statistician who became intrigued by a particular type of scratch-off lottery ticket called an extended-play game — sometimes referred to as a baited hook — that has a tic-tac-toe grid of visible numbers that looks like a miniature spreadsheet. Srivastava discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off — the ticket could be cracked if you figured out the secret code. Srivastava's fundamental insight was that the apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie because the software that generates the tickets has to precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. 'It wasn't that hard,' says Srivastava. 'I do the same kind of math all day long.'"
Seems to be the same as the Wired Article (Score:5, Informative)
The same article appeared in Feb 2011 issue of Wired [wired.com] even though Lottery Post doesn't seem to go out of its way to attribute the author and cite the issue properly.
Re:Small typo (Score:4, Informative)
from TFA:
"Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited," Srivastava says. "I'd have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That's not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets."
Re:When was the last time you picked.... (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA
"Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests," he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. "Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious," he says. "Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers.
Re:You don't have to be non-random for fixed winne (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds to me like they should figure the game out in such a way that a real random number generator will generate winners and losers at the desired rates on average and then just rely on the law of averages / large numbers to give them their desired take.
Forgot to login, sorry for the dup
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Story plagiarised from WIRED (Score:5, Informative)
Yet again, Slashdot links to some parastic site that copied the original story rather than the source: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1 [wired.com].
Re:Story plagiarised from WIRED (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2006/11/21/lottery-probe.html [www.cbc.ca]
Toronto statistician Mohan Srivastava also discovered a way the tickets could be decoded to predict a winner on the game "Tic Tac Toe" nearly three years ago. Srivastava would look at the numbers on the ticket, and if a sequence of numbers was lined up in tic-tac-toe fashion and were not repeated anywhere else on the ticket, it was likely a winner. "If someone explained the trick to you, I think, I actually know, a child could do it," Srivastava said. He contacted the OLG about the trend, and while the corporation recalled unsold tickets of the game, it never went public with the information.