RE: The Lottery
January 8, 2015 at 11:33 am
(This post was last modified: January 8, 2015 at 11:34 am by Heywood.)
I doubt it is rigged. It is possible that there may be some bias in the generation of randomness though...and you might be able to exploit that. But I highly doubt it as the information to determine if there is an exploitable bias is relatively easy to come by. Someone would have beat you too it. Actually....lots of people would have beat you too it.
What you should do instead is learn how to compute the expected value of a gambling transaction. When my son turned 18 he and I made a simple spreadsheet. In the spread sheet we would key in information about scratch tickets and claimed prized from the states website and use it to compute the actual value of a scratch ticket. The best scratch tickets that cost a dollar were worth 67 cents. These were from games in which a lot of tickets were sold but few or none of the big prizes had yet been claimed.
What you should do instead is learn how to compute the expected value of a gambling transaction. When my son turned 18 he and I made a simple spreadsheet. In the spread sheet we would key in information about scratch tickets and claimed prized from the states website and use it to compute the actual value of a scratch ticket. The best scratch tickets that cost a dollar were worth 67 cents. These were from games in which a lot of tickets were sold but few or none of the big prizes had yet been claimed.
