Lottery Strategies- Calculating randomness

Lottery Strategies- Calculating randomness

by Liv | Published on March 30th, 2006, 9:13 am | Life

I'm sitting in my cube here at work and people are coming in with their lottery tickets they picked up on their commute. About every 5 minutes someone is jumping up out of their cube and screaming "I Won" after they've scratched their tickets. I feel kind of left out. I forgot to buy one. I've yet to see anyone to yell I won, and then scream "take this job and shove it", so I'm left to believe there hasn't been any life altering Lotto scratchers yet.... but this is madness. It's like Christmas for North Carolina today or something.... I've got to see if I can sneak out of work, and get my bum over to the gas station for my chance at wealth and riches.

North Carolina Lottery

Oh you've got to wonder about all the mom & pop gas stations just across the Virgina border today. Sitting there empty as North Carolina gamblers, and thrill seekers no longer cross the humble state line to purchase their Lotto Tickets. Vacant registers, unemployed cashiers. Whats to become of all these little gas stations? I'm sure alot of the owners are asking the same questions.

But here at home, in North Carolina we've taken back our hard earned dollars, we've said no to taxation without education. We've stood tall and firm, and today is the day where we say to Virginia, This is our Lotto independence day!!!

It's so nice to think I'm funding my child's future. Especially since we didn't know how we we're going to pay for preschool. Yes today I donated 15.00 to the likes of all North Carolina's children! And you know what? I Won. Exactly $11.00 and a free ticket! Talk about a free pass to higher education! So eat that Virginia, Eat that South Carolina. Now if we can just pass a law legalizing gambling and can get Roy Carrol to convert the Wachovia building into a casino, we'll be in business.

I'm completely against the lottery. Just look at the way it was bamboozeled through our state house and you can tell where this is going. All it does is steal money from poor people that don't understand how the odds work.

Just go look at some of the states that have invoked the lottery demon, then tell me if its helped them any.

I have in my hand 25, count'em... 25 North Carolina Powerball Lottery tickets.

We've started a Lotto club at work. Yes after seeing the show Windfall, me and several other people chipped in 5 dollars apiece to start our first ever work lotto club. We've already got more people for next time, and tonight I may be exactly 4 million dollars richer, as will 5 other co-workers when we win the 20 million dollars.

Now if everything works out, you will find me blogging next week from some remote destination eating extravagant food, wearing beautiful clothing. Doors will open for me, (and I'm not talking about the "seeing-eye" doors at Food Lion.) Red carpets will roll out before me. My teeth will gleam, there will be a twinkle in my eye, and everything will be perfect.

Or I'll just lose, and cuss like a drunk red-neck at my TV when they show the numbers.

http://www.newsandrecord.com/apps/pbcs. ... 1/61019014

Is there anyone here that really believes that the lottery funds are going to supplement school funds in the state? I think its a sham. If it works here like it does in other states the general education budget will be cut proportional to the amount of money that is infused by the lottery.

I think the lottery funds ought to have a very specific purpose and can be used for that purpose only. If that's the case now then I just haven't seen it. Personally I wish the lottery fund would be used to provide scholarships to instate schools for low-income needy students.

Imagine buying a Powerball ticket and failing to check it against the drawings! Someone appears to have done just that, and tossed aside over a half-million dollars.

What a maroon! :shock:

You know the day after, Someone is going to check it....

I'm sorry but they don't deserve it, if they're that damn stupid to lose it.

It appears the Brits are bad at math. So are most Americans from what I can tell, but this is funny.

lottery_ticket.jpg (11.54 KiB) Viewed 4626 times

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. The lotto received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

Tina Farrell, called the lotto after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned the lotto and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.

"I think they're are giving people the wrong impression - the card doesn't say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled."

A spokeswoman said the game was withdrawn after reports that some players had not understood the concept.

She said: "The instructions for playing the Cool Cash scratchcard are clear - and are printed on each individual card and in the game procedures available at each retailer. However, because of the potential for player confusion we have decided to withdraw the game."

"There have always been some people who find numbers and basic mathematics difficult. Maybe in the past it was less noticeable because people could find jobs they could excel in without having qualifications in math."

VIA

Well, I won $10 in last night's Mega Millions drawing. Not time to retire just yet.

I see on Yahoo news that a group of 8 co-workers won a $276 million jackpot the other night. That works out on an immediate payout basis (most jackpot winners do that... why, I don't know) to a cash payday of about $11 million each.

The headline I saw on this says that they plan to keep working. I hate that.

Why the heck do you play the lottery? To just have a 7 or 8 figure checking account? If I won the lottery, my first priority would be to step aside from my job and let someone who needs a salary to have a shot at the one I no longer need.

Sure, these ladies from W Va might just LOVE their jobs. I hate hearing about people who love their jobs. I haven't loved my job since I was bloody well a paper boy. GRRRRRRRRRRR!

SouthernFriedInfidel wrote:I haven't loved my job since I was bloody well a paper boy

I expect there are still some vacancies for someone with the right qualifications.

Actually this got me thinking. Some of my more interesting jobs were student summer jobs when I was at school. My best one was being a bus conductor on the country bus company that serviced the Thames Valley. I collected fares on the double decker country buses that went round the villages and towns. I worked all hours, met a whole lot of people, including many really nice girls coming home late from parties. It was the early 70's and mini/micro skirts were the fashion. Which on a double decker bus was a horny young man's (or a horny Benny Hill's) fantasy come true.

That was a lot more fun than being a milkman, because despite the prevailing perception, bored young housewives were not just waiting for a handsome young milkman to liven up their lives. The only come-on I got was from an elderly drunk which scared the hell out of me and I fled the scene as fast as the electric milk float could muster (a fast walking pace)

When I went to University my summer jobs became a lot more lucrative but a lot less interesting.

When I win my lotto....

I'm showing up at work, buying everyone a burrito.... grabbing a megaphone and telling everyone the "truth"....

then I'll go and rent a nice inflamatory billboard somewhere in town with greensboring.com on it....

and then disappear for a long, long time...

So this guy "studies the odds carefully" before he decides which scratch-n-sniff cards to buy. And he thinks the odds of winning the top prize are acceptable. Only when he discovers that the top prizes for the card series he decided on are all taken before he buys a card, he gets all p!ssy and sues the state. What. An. Idiot!

I'd be stunned if I wasn't laughing so hard. Why the heck does anyone buy a lottery ticket? Only because he thinks he might win the top prize available? Is that the only way to consider a lottery ticket purchase a "success"? :lol:

Last weekend, I bought 5 $2 tickets in Va. I scratched off a $10 winner and a $2 winner. THAT'S your success scenario, folks. I got back more than I put in. I used my "success" to buy a soda and headed back to NC with a full tank of $3.95 gas. Happy day. :mrgreen:

I've played about 3 times in the last month on the $5.00 scratchers...

Not even a dollar.... but somewhere I have a lotto ticket from London were I won 10 pounds....

I lost count of how many levels of stupid this guy is. Ugh! I can't even get all the words out for how ridiculous this is!!!

As some may have noticed I added to Greensboring's algorithm a small function to calculate the winning Powerball lottery number on the front page. (for logged in peeps)

It's more than just rand() numbers, it's actually 2 weeks of prime-time commercial programming (as in me programming in between House & Prison Break) which all came about after playing the lotto a few weeks ago. I've always been skeptical about allowing the state machines choose my numbers, somehow inside of me I've always had the feeling like I'm John Kerry at the hands of Diebold. I thought surely the lotto isn't completely random. Numbers are drawn on a mechanical device, certain physical aspects of the draw should be able to at least give the right algorithm a better probability for winning then just randomness, right?

Honestly I have no clue. But I built a sql database, and a couple algorithms for analyzing the data. It really interesting when you start trending data.... Even in just the 4 months of data in the database, I've got several weeks where the powerball number repeated exactly the same for 2 weeks in a row, the most popular powerball is "2", and on average the sum of the winning numbers (minus the powerball) is 163. What's really odd is once again on 9/13 & 9/10 during consecutive draws the sums were both 147 Even more odd is the probability of the sum's last digit to be a "7" is higher then any other random number.

While I don't expect to win any time soon, I have alot more confidence in my number's then random numbers. Greensboring's display numbers are using a scaling probability algorithm, though I still reload them and check them for uniqueness and odd/even randomness before playing... Anyhow, I thought it would be fun to share... so I added it onto the website...

Shan thinks I'm a nutter.... as does the lotto guy at Food Lion who is now regretful for asking how I choose my numbers.... but there is hope.

For the record I got 2 numbers on the same line last week. Coincidence or not... it's funner this way.

The litmus test is whether as you add data your anomalous frequecies become more defined or more diffused. Even completely random data will show bunching, but it will tend to decome more diffuse as more data accumulates

My test will be if I win... My control is Shan's random guessing a line... she lost last week, I got 2 on the same line....