odds against wining the lottery

[Tiberius]

So a non-consecutive run is more probable, but the odds of a consecutive run are still the same, in the sense of the chance of picking the 6 numbers that the machine selects?

The only reason a non-consecutive run is more "probable" is because there are only a few consecutive runs out of the billions of ball arrangements. Thus you will always get more non-consecutive runs than consecutive. The chances are the same though. Think about it like this:

You have a bag with 10 balls in it, 9 of them are black, 1 of them is red. The black balls are all linked to non-consecutive numbers, and the red ball is a consecutive number. The chances of pulling the red ball out is 1/10, whilst the chances of pulling a black ball out is 9/10. On face value, it looks like choosing a consecutive number is better, but remember that the lottery is all about matching a pre-determined "choice" to a number of balls. When you factor this pre-determined choice in, the colour of the balls loses all meaning in the probability of things, because what you are actually after is the selection of a number. If each ball has a different consecutive or non-consecutive number on it, then the chances of matching that number to your pre-chosen number is 1/10 for every single ball.

This video might help you understand the thing about probability and pre-determined results:

[youtube]X1uJD1O3L08[/youtube]

Here's how he did it:

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The full film above is 9 hours long. Derren Brown simply tossed a coin for 9 hours until 10 heads in a row came up. Throughout that hour a lot of other combinations of 10 flips came up, but none were the combination he needed.

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