The one year anniversary of September 11- and the New York lottery number that comes up is 9-1-1.
From the blip I saw, the lady announcing the number as the little balls bounced up didn’t pay any heed to the significance.
Since the odds of any pick-three number are 1000 to 1. And the odds of the pick-three matching the date on which it falls increases the odds a few thousand-fold. And since 9/11 is the most recent, important-date-to-remember to come up in some time…
Think about how many people there are in the world.
Think about how many square miles of land there are here on earth.
Think about how many raindrops fall in the whole world in a day. The odds of that particular raindrop falling on your head as you stood in that particular spot today are incalculably small; how can things that are so unlikely happen all of the time?
The odds are exactly the same for each drawing, no matter what day it is. And since there are two drawings each day, the odds of drawing 9-1-1 on any given day are 500 to 1. Even on September 11[sup]th[/sup]. While it’s definately a long shot, it’s not really my idea of astronomical.
C’mon guys, it wasn’t rigged. Unfortunately for the people who picked those numbers, everyone had the same idea they did. Who actually thought they’d win though?
This is actually slightly incorrect. Very very very slightly incorrect, but nevertheless incorrect.
You can determine this by asking “what if there were 1000 lotteries during the day?” The odds are not 1000 out of 1000 that 9-1-1 would be drawn because they are seperate trials and thus, no matter how unlikely, any given number has a chance of not being drawn.
The correct formula for two trials is ((N*2)-1)/N[sup]2[/sup] where N is the number of outcomes of any given trial.
Thus, with 1000 outcomes the odds are 1999/1,000,000 or .001999. Yes, I realize this is only a smidgen off from .002, but imagine if you only had two dice rolls. There, the odds would be 11/36 that you rolled at least one 1, not 12/36, and that could make a huge difference between winning and losing in your gambling.
And the Bible Number Code folks are having a grand old time with it!
What do those numbers mean again? Nine is god’s completeness? Fruition? And eleven is judgement…or you could say one…being unity…
Grateful thanks to Enderw24 for correcting my sloppy calculation. This is exactly the kind of interaction I hope to find by hanging out at SDMB.
I find it is more clear to figure the odds on NOT drawing 9-1-1 on a given day with two drawings. That, of course would be 999/1000 * 999/1000 = 998,001/1,000,000 = .998001.
Then the odds of getting 9-1-1 at least once in the two drawings would be 1- .998001 = .001999, or 500.25012 to one against.
Actually, it was 5,631 people. But you are right about the $500 prize.
The only thing that I am surprised about is that New York waited so long to close out that number combination. Ohio, for example, limits its loss at $100,000 for the 3-number game, which would limit sales of any one combination to 2,000. I guess either New York figures they can handle a larger liability, or their system doesn’t do enough real-time balancing to limit the sales in time.
I heard about this from a certain friend of mine, who thought I’d heard about it already. Given that I’m usually behind in reading the paper, I had not. We both thought it was a freaky, trippy coincidence or something. Don’t know if it was rigged, but whoa man… certainly something.
