Nice hack! This begs the question, though, what is the optimal choice in light of what other people will do? If it turns out that some numbers are more likely to occur than others, then rational people will choose those numbers. So if more people do choose those numbers, the pot will be split amongst a greater number of players, thus you will win less. So maybe you're better off choosing numbers that come up less frequently. Ah, but hang on, another rational choice is to choose the numbers that come up less frequently, because their turn has gotta come soon. So more people will choose those numbers, leading to smaller payoffs to you when you win.

The fallacy at the root of these kinds of arguments is that the balls have a notion of what went before. If ball 32 hasn't come up in the 276 previous games, that doesn't mean it's more or less likely to come up than any other ball in the next game. They have no history of what went before.

Which is to say that if you want to play Lotto (a.k. Fool's Tax) and write a script to pick Lotto numbers for you, start with a truly random source. I recall reading some time ago that the "autopick" selection of some country, where you pay and the computer fills the coupons with random numbers for you, was flawed. The numbers it chose were not really random. The numbers failed the Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney test, or some damn thing. As the numbers were not truly random, and the actual number selection was, well, those autopick coupons just didn't win as often. Chance? Design?

update: cleaned up the prose in a couple of spots -- ahhh, proofreading.

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random. Some theory should be used. -- Donald Knuth.

--
g r i n d e r

In reply to Re: Picking (potentially) winning lottery numbers by grinder
in thread Picking (potentially) winning lottery numbers by scain

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