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.'"
Small typo (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I've been audited every year since. I haven't even been a contractor for over 4 years, I work for the Government and I'm still audited because
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus, what a choice to have to make: consulting or scratch lottery tickets.
Better to throw oneself off a cliff.
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.
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That would be a cool augmented reality app (kindof like that camera-phone sudoku solver app that OCR'd the numbers and overlaid the missing numbers in their correct boxes)
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I don't see how you could make any money on your own with the complicity of the store clerks. Those tickets are in rolls which present a number of problems:
1) How long does it take to scan a roll for winning tickets past a certain amount?
2) How do you maintain the integrity of the roll since you would be pulling out individual tickets?
3) Employees are usually barred from claiming tickets themselves and I have a hunch that a conspiracy to game the lottery like that is illegal.
4) The lotteries have already g
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Hey, there's also a great deal of entertainment value to playing the lottery.
Once as a kid during a summer job I made that joke when I saw a truck driver playing a lotto ticket. The response he gave me was that it was only costing him $2-$3 dollars a week, and in exchange he had a plausible hope that he might someday win millions of dollars and never have to work again. To him, that was worth the couple of bucks a week.
Also, there is a lot more to gambling than mathematical ignorance. I'll hit a casino o
Reminds me of a Junior High experience (Score:3)
Back in (Greek) Junior High we went for a one-day school trip to an island (Poros IIRC). The day plan consistend of letting a few dozens of 14-15 year-olds roam around the town unattended. Obviously, one of my group's first stops was at an Arcade, to spend some coins on things like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or NBA Jam. Another group of friends called us to a back room to check something out. There was an electronic (electromechanic?) gambling machine that had a roullette (but with fewer segments than the clas
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From TFA:
His next thought was utterly predictable: "I remember thinking, I'm gonna be rich! I'm gonna plunder the lottery!" he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. "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."
So, for him, the lottery was not profitable and interesting enough.
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This is all very interesting but if you want to earn the big bucks, you start your own lottery.
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Middle management and the front seats of taxicabs are littered with the bones of "intelligent" people who've gone to business school. I would bet the percentage of B-school grads who "make millions" is a little lower than you may think.
I've seen the haunted looks on the poor souls who are about to graduate from the business school at my (rather prestigious) institution.
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Funny)
The best advice for someone who wants to "make millions" came from the Buddha.
If you meet the millionaire on the road, kill him?
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Funny)
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
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The MIT entry exam consists of giving away all you possessions before being admitted. Hence, the statistically low number of affluent MIT educated statisticians. (Un)fortunally, I failed that exam.
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I didn't know MIT was located in Vatican City ...
If you'd Read TFA ... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
If you'd read the fine article, you'd have seen that he calculated how much he'd earn by using his system and how long it would take - and found that it was far lower than his consulting pay rate. So if he spent time doing it rather than his day job he'd be taking a pay cut.
Sounds to me like a GOOD mathematician - one who applies math to ALL the aspects of the problem and comes to the right conclusion.
Re:If you'd Read TFA ... (Score:5, Interesting)
A consultant. (Score:3)
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."
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The lottery system probably logs ticket sales and ticket checks to a central server. Attempting to check tickets before buying them would probably raise a red flag.
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I don't know what state you are in, but here in California, they can scan the barcode on the back to find out if the tickets are winners or not. You don't even have to do any math.
WTF? Is that not a problem for people? Surely the guys in the shop keep all the winners?
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.
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistics isn't hard? Let me guess, you base that on a couple of college courses? As an engineer, I've frequently run into statistical problems that neither I nor my coworkers have even the foggiest notion of how to approach. Things can get really ugly when you start dealing with the real world.
You're certainly right about one thing though - most mathematicians do the math because they enjoy it. Those aforementioned problems that were beyond me? I typically recruit some mathematicians and physicists I know from college, and they solve them for free.
Re:Small typo (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow defensive much...
He is just stating statistics (at least those that he bumps into in his line of work) isn't easy, and what's wrong with asking his "former peers" for help if they don't mind.
Where did he say he is an Excellent engineer?
What makes you think he is obsessed with money? It's a job of course you do it for money.
Prestige? You speak as if academics don't have any prestige to their jobs.
Re:Small typo (Score:5, Insightful)
Well you're an arrogant arsehole, aren't you? You've just accused the guy of a bunch of stuff you've derived from your own assumptions, you appear to deride the guy as being obsessed with prestige and then you go on to blow your own trumpet.
You come off as an arrogant and hypocritical prick. And while you might be good a mathematics, I would hazard a guess you're not much use for anything else... case in point: you deride people who, knowing that they don't have the skills to do a task on their own, call on friends for help. Going it alone is generally a less successful strategy if the sum of human achievement is anything to go by.
Re:Small typo (Score:4, Insightful)
Spoken like a true parapsychologist. More bad science comes out of researchers underestimating statistics than out of all other sources combined.
breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Horatio Caine says (Score:3, Funny)
Now that's *sunglasses* the ticket.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
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Where is the "Stab that guy in the face over the Internet" device when you need it?
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YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
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Looks like someone found his wit *sunglasses* a little too sharp.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!
When was the last time you picked.... (Score:3)
When was the last time you were allowed to look through and then pick the scratch off tickets you wanted from a spindle of tickets behind the counter.
While the game is flawed, there is no real way to get only the winners.
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While the game is flawed, there is no real way to get only the winners.
Unless you work with a store employee. Oh, it would NEVER happen....
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Yeah, no way a guy named Mohan Srivastava would know anyone who works in a 7-eleven.
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They don't even need that. All they have to do is scan the card on those bar code scanners and it will tell you which ones are winners. I haven't seen them in a while (probably because someone figured it out...)
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I think one rules in Ontario is that you get to pick the ticket and not the counter guy.
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I was kind of wondering the same thing. Maybe, just maybe, if you were personal friends with someone in the store, they'd let you look through the tickets for the winners. There's very likely a law of some sort about that too. Most likely, you and the employee who assisted with, would end up in jail for conspiracy to defraud the state and/or lottery commission. I'm fairly sure they have to give you the next ticket, not let you pick through the stack until you find one you "like".
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No no, you examine the whole roll, write down which ones you want and have the person behind the counter by them for you as they come up. You pay him 10% of the take and you probably more than doubled his income.
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.
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RTFA and you'll find out how you can look at lots of tickets and take your pick of which to buy.
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Re:When was the last time you picked.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1) Be a retailer, or get a job for a retailer, selling lottery tickets. This would get past your "there is no real way to get only the winners"
Step 2) Take all the scratched tickets that people throw away onsite, and scan them for hints as to how to pick winners.
Step 3) Buy a bunch of probable winners to see how accurate you are, and if you are accurate, profit.
Now a few things come to mind.
Many people like to buy the "new" tickets as they seem to "win" more often. This would be normal if took a few weeks for retailers to get a handle on how to pick the winners. You win more often when "chance" is in play, and less often when the probably winners have been weeded out.
It would also explain how retailers cash a high percentage of winners, in Canada at least, were this has been in the news for the past few years.
Here is one such article, and note, this has led to changes in Canada. Seemingly not good enough.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=4be28910-9cec-4785-b471-f37849a29008&k=17633
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Actually, it has nothing to do with retailers in Canada being a high percentage of winners. What actually happened was that when a customer who won a large prize handed in his or her ticket and the machine beeped, the retailer told the customer he or she won a free ticket and then took the multi-figure winning ticket to the lottery commission pretending he or she bought it. It was plain old fraud, and a number of retailers are currently under indictment for it. (Also, as your article states, the tickets
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Old News (Score:2)
This was in Wired Magazine earlier last month.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1
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.
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Copying others' work without attribution, in a forum dedicated to the idea of reaping riches without working for it? I would have never imagined!
You don't have to be non-random for fixed winners (Score:2)
They must be dumbing the explanation down. You don't have to be non-random to control the number of winners. You can use a deterministic process to generate all the tickets in a series, and then a true random process to control the order in which the tickets are printed. If they're not doing that, they're really screwing up. Even a fairly dinky computer should be able to store patterns for all the tickets in a Big F'n Array, and use real random numbers to shuffle the Array. Then hit "print".
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
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You can use a deterministic process to generate all the tickets in a series
If you started at the time of the big bang, such a process wouldn't have finished yet.
Even a fairly dinky computer should be able to store patterns for all the tickets in a Big F'n Array
Ha ha.
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The problem isn't the order of the tickets, its that the tickets have visible info on them that gives away the hidden info. Of course, you're still right that you don't need to be non-random to control the number of winners. Just use a true random process to generate the tickets, and a separate process to analyze the tickets created and hold back any winning tickets once you pass a certain quota (and re-introduce them to the stream at a random point if you fall too far below quota).
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Knock Knock.. (Score:2)
Lottery Commission.
DOH!
lawsuit in... (Score:3)
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.
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If we estimate 220 working days a year this means he makes more than 132,000 a year. Seems like either he makes quite a bit or he needs to think bigger. Get 10 people all doing this and have him take 50% of the profits.
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I'd guess he would rather expend his energy contributing to society rather than cheating a lottery. It's the difference between creating money and creating wealth. The people who concentrate on the latter tend to be more successful in the long run.
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Wow, you are naive. The name Bernie Madoff mean anything to you? And don't act like that finally caught up to him, he protected everyone else and will probably be released in 10 years when he is sick and old. Maybe High Frequency trading rings a bell? Perhaps you have heard of the tricks Microsoft used to gain and keep a desktop monopoly?
Re:Coolest part of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but those are big crooks. Ripping off the lotto to the tune of $150k a year makes you a small crook, and small crooks do big time.
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Which is why I suggested having lots of people doing it for you. Then you might be able to make enough for the proper campaign contributions. Maybe not though.
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I also am not naive enough to believe that the truly rich got that way by creating wealth when we have clear evidence that for a significant fraction this is not the case.
See... go again and read the post you are replying to... Here's the snippet I think is relevant:
It's the difference between creating money and creating wealth. The people who concentrate on the latter tend to be more successful in the long run.
Are you sure you aren't confusing "being successful" with "being rich"?
E.g. would you consider Mother Theresa unsuccessful?
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Mother Theresa was a fraud, and for that matter died after having amassed a lot of money that NEVER went to helping the poor and needy. But, yes, she was successful. Hell, she even convinced you and at least 1.166 billion other people that she was a saint!
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Oddly enough, plundering the lottery isn't very different from robbing charities. In most cases, lottery proceeds are directly used to fund public schools. Methodically ripping off public schools for a living is, in my opinion, ethically problematic. Of course, ripping off poor, uneducated people to fund public schools is also, in my opinion, ethically problematic.
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That and they'd probably arrest him at some point.
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No need to guess:
"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."
lotto and big slot wins are tax-free within Canada (Score:2)
lotto and big slot wins are tax-free within Canada
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I thought that was pretty cool too. But he said it took 45 seconds or so to figure out if a ticket was a winner, and that was the big issue. But that was back in '03. Today, you could easily program a smartphone to recognize the pattern on the ticker and figure out for you if the ticket is a winner in a second or two, easily increasing the rate you could do this.
It would still be hard work and I'd imagine it would be very boring and tedious to do every day, but you could do it faster today.
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Couldn't you just buy them in bulk and return them like the article says? Then you can use a machine to scan and select winners and losers. Then just return the losers and cash in your winners.
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um, that's between $150,000 and $215,000 a year, depending on if we are talking about only working days or not. While that's not CEO-money, it's nothing to sneeze at (it puts you in the top 20% of households in the U.S.A.). I'd say that would be worth my time, and the time of just about everyone that I know, assuming that you could pull it off in no more than 40 hours per week.
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Wouldn't that put you in the top 3% or so? Only need $90k for top 20%.
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Do you know any stores that will allow you to inspect their scratch-off lotto tickets to pick out the specific ones on the roll you'd like to buy? How would you pull this off?
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It wasn't, for him, on that game, but the article goes on to speculate that it's extremely profitable for some people.
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Why major in math? (Score:4, Funny)
Because I am calling you from my boat, BITCH!
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.
The flaw in the "system" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Just make sure you do it at a soup kitchen in an area where you'll never go or be recognized again. Last thing you want is a bunch of winos hounding you down yelling "Give us more of those lotto tickets!"
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That does a lookup to a db in most cases. The UPC only gives them a number to check the DB for, not any information about status of the ticket. All of this seems worthless unless you can return tickets you have not scratched off or if they will sell them out of order, both are things most lottery ticket sellers will not do.
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TFA says otherwise.
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This is slashdot, we don't RTFA. You don't even have the excuse of being new here.
I was only familiar with the PA system, which seems to do a lookup of some sort because if the phone line or other connection the lottery terminal uses is not connected it cannot validate winning tickets.
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Correction: YOU and some others don't read the article. And you lower the quality of the site enormously by commenting without doing so. Plenty of other people do read the article first, especially the ones who get modded up.
Don't judge others by your own low standards.
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You can pick and choose lotter tickets all you like, if you are working at a place that sells them. Just exam each new ticket as it comes up and buy any winning one that is available. You could even pay off an employee to do this with you.
Re:Old story... (Score:5, Funny)
A week is not old for slashdot, I can see you are new here so we can let it slide this once. In the future you should probably also not read the articles.
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plagiarized? Usually when you plagiarize something you don't mention the source. See that mention of "Wired" at the bottom below the pictures/above the comments?