(January 8, 2015 at 4:30 pm)Heywood Wrote: Sometimes it is possible to spot "variations" in the tickets which will tell you it is a winner or not without having to scratch them off.

I would imagine that if a cursory look lets you occasionally see a winner without scratching the ticket, a more sensitive, mechanized approach would show you winners reliably.
It might be worth a couple bucks to buy some, probably losing, tickets and play with imaging them. I would expect the lottery police to shut down any consistent winning strategy as son as it was identified. Big investments in time or equipment probably don't have a high payback likelihood. But for giggles....

Two thoughts:

1. There is no such thing as a not-for-profit casino.

2. Lotteries are taxes on people who don't understand arithmetic.

Boru

(January 8, 2015 at 7:00 am)BlackMason Wrote: I'm currently half heartedly working on a "theory" that the lottery is not random as most people think. Data is available but not in the time frames that would make my research easier. What I mean is that there is a website that tracks the frequency of a number through a 12 month period. The next time frame is 10 years! I'm expecting certain numbers to have lower frequencies over a long enough time period. The idea is that if the lottery is random then the numbers would have a similar frequency distribution.

Why do I think the lottery is not random? Because casino slot machines and similar equipment is rigged. The lottery is gambling. The way the lottery works is by playing on the hopes and greed of individuals by promising life changing money. Therefore I believe there has to be a way for the lottery operators to prevent too many people winning the jackpot. If too many people win the jackpot then they will have to split the prize money. This has the effect of making the lottery lose it's lustre. No other gambling system has life changing jackpots like the big L.

I'm not a scientist so I need help especially with interpreting data. Any statisticians out here? The first step, making an observation, is really difficult. For non-professionals at least. Actually for me. Anyone got any insight or input?

So far I've seen that certain numbers fail to come out while others come out every time. This is in an 11 month period. Others have abysmal records failing to obtain in 7 months like the number 20. The best numbers are 28, 32 and 45. They came out all the time in the 11 month period. 1, 16, 34 and 48 failed only once.

This is based on the South African lottery pick 6 between 1 and 49.

You're wasting your time. If there's a fix, it's going to be a one-time or irregular event. What you're engaged in is essentially superstitious-- some numbers have come up, so you believe that random events are biased in favor of those numbers.

Where are the excel whizzes? I know how to generate random numbers like the lottery. Problem is sometimes I get duplicates in the same row. The lottery doesn't allow that. What formula can I input to ensure I don't get duplicates in a single lottery combination?

For all the nay sayers telling me I'm wasting my time: Conventional wisdom has it's golden nuggets. But they lie in a river bed filled with fools gold.

Unlike most of you, I want to do science and not just talk about it. Now I've made some observations and I want to test them.

(January 9, 2015 at 6:38 am)BlackMason Wrote: Where are the excel whizzes? I know how to generate random numbers like the lottery. Problem is sometimes I get duplicates in the same row. The lottery doesn't allow that. What formula can I input to ensure I don't get duplicates in a single lottery combination?

For all the nay sayers telling me I'm wasting my time: Conventional wisdom has it's golden nuggets. But they lie in a river bed filled with fools gold.

Unlike most of you, I want to do science and not just talk about it. Now I've made some observations and I want to test them.

If that's the case, you should procure one of these for your experiment:

(January 9, 2015 at 7:14 am)Cato Wrote: If that's the case, you should procure one of these for your experiment:

Cato, you raise a very good point. So as a response to preserving the integrity of my experiment, I'm forced to change my hypothesis. Instead of saying the lottery is rigged, I'm going to move to the position that it is not random instead.

The hypothesis "it is rigged" is too specific and I don't have the money to spend on a ball set machine. My control was not suitable for that hypothesis. However the new hypothesis allows me to keep my current experiment because I'm testing randomness. If my data does show it is not random, that is all I can say. I can't take the step to say it is rigged because I would be affirming the consequent which is a pattern of invalid argument or fallacy if you will.

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(January 8, 2015 at 10:35 pm)bennyboy Wrote: You're wasting your time. If there's a fix, it's going to be a one-time or irregular event. What you're engaged in is essentially superstitious...

What you're engaged in is an argument from ignorance.

As others have mentioned, you don't need to rig the game when you set the odds of the game.

If you do play the lottery, you can improve your odds by using numbers over 31. Reasoning is that many people use birthdays, anniversaries etc. for their picks, which must be 1 to 31, so by using higher numbers, if you do hit, you're less likely to split.

Some video poker machines actually have positive EV if played correctly. The house lets it go because some of the correct plays are counter-intuitive, and so almost all players are playing at negative EV. Also, even playing correctly, you'll likely need a lot of time and a decent bankroll to get ahead, as you'll probably be behind until you hit a natural straight flush, or whatever the game's top payout is.

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Just remembered something that happened a while back. The state daily lottery was rigged one day. It was the ping-pong ball type. balls other than fours and sixes were weighted to decrease the probability of them being selected. You guys'll love the result - 666.

Problem is that you can't keep something like this quiet for long, and the people who rigged it (the host of the nightly drawing was the mastermind) ended up in jail.

Despite decades at 12 Steppers with concurrent participation by hordes of gambling addicts, I'm still perplexed at the idea.

I try not to be unsympathetic when they're at 12 Steppers, but I'm totally clueless on their issue.

(January 9, 2015 at 5:07 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: Despite decades at 12 Steppers with concurrent participation by hordes of gambling addicts, I'm still perplexed at the idea.

I try not to be unsympathetic when they're at 12 Steppers, but I'm totally clueless on their issue.

Yep. I was hooked on drugs, but I can go to the casino and make twenty bucks last two or three hours, and never put in another dime.

But, from reading about gambling addicts, they seem to have very similar behavior patterns regarding gambling as I did with drugs.

For this reason I'm not a fan of the "addictive personality" view.

I go to the casinos for the food. No kidding, in 25 years, I have put less than $10 in slot machines, and in both cases, it was money given me by my date to gamble with.

I literally find watching paint drying to be more interesting than a slot machine. But I realize it is a huge problem for others. A friend of my sister lost her home when her husband pissed away $120,000 in 2 years. She stuck with him, hell if I know why.