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.'"
Re:breaking news (Score:5, Interesting)
This just in: MIT-educated statistician Mohan Srivastava was sued for DMCA violations for demonstrating a trivial security flaw in lottery tickets.
Coolest part of the article (Score:5, Interesting)
After calculating that his average winnings would come out to $600 a day:
"People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn't take advantage of the lottery," he says. "I can assure you that that's not the case. I'd simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn't worth my time."
Moral of the story for those who play the lotto: Even if you figure out how to break the game, it still isn't worth playing.
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people are not motivated primarily by greed. I'm guessing many people who go to MIT and become statisticians fall into that category, I mean, if they have that mindset and level of intelligence they could easily have gone to a business school and gone on to make millions. I'm not saying scientists, engineers and mathematicians are saints, they can be as petty as anyone, but if they wanted to be millionaires, they would have chosen different careers.
He figured out the pattern from 2 tickets (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the Wired article; the amazing thing is he did this with sample size of two.
Re:If you'd Read TFA ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Charity (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were him, I might have gone down to the local soup kitchen and told a couple homeless people about it, and given them each a few tickets to demonstrate it. That community could have benefited for a few weeks or months before the lotto figured it out.
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Interesting)
The obvious solution is to make a webpage to crack the code, and then make a deal with someone who has a smartphone but makes much less than $600/day.