Very insulting, thanks.
Not the question that was asked. My feeble brain does understand that some people are trying very hard to answer a different question.
We answered the question in the OP in the very first reply. Now that that’s answered, we’re moving on to a related and slightly more interesting question. And we’ve made it clear that the related question is the question we’re now discussing.
The lottery does not have true random number generators, if such a thing actually exists. For games, like Keno, that draws a new batch of numbers every 4 minutes, they have several programs that attempt to provide a random selection of numbers and these programs are changed out several times at unknown/secret intervals. For the actual jackpot drawings I believe that they are still using the old numbered ping pong balls stirred by air, weight checked, highly monitored, etc, to keep the number generation out of the machines.
Source: My now dead sister used to work for a state lottery and I am not supposed to know about this.
And also several sets of balls and several sets of machines that are randomly chosen each time.
And with the odds of winning and the amounts of money involved, i stated my opinion that i found it amusing to be worried about.
I also think its a bit silly to worry about if you have a positive or negative expected retirllurn for your 2 bucks.
My apologies if my opinions insulted anyone.
For starters, try beating the (relatively primitive) Rock-Paper-Scissors bot 
Here is one simple study of 37 people
where distinct non-randomness was already visible in examining pairs of digits.
I often enjoy the tangents and side roads that threads here take, and this one is no different.
In any case, I somehow managed to not hit any of the numbers in my 5 easy picks. Looks like I will have to muddle through with my middle class existence at least a little while longer, until perhaps I play again. Powerball at $610 million now.
Years ago I remember reading a text book that a illustrated its with a study that reported that repeated number like 7,7,7,7 got higher pay outs than other combinations precisely because people thought that since they didn’t look random they wouldn’t come up. But the study may have been before automatic number pics became common.
I support Chronos’s suggestion of a computerized random pick from a list of numbers excluding a black list of easy to devive numbers, e.g. dates, pi, any number from a fortune cookie.
That probably depends on the kind of lottery. 7,7,7,7 would presumably be from a “pick 4” lottery: Four ball machines, each containing ten single-digit balls, which combine to make a 4-digit number (which can repeat digits). It’s easy to see that there are only 10,000 possible draws in such a game.
On the other hand, there are the big games like Powerball, that have tens or hundreds of millions of possible draws (though without repeated numbers, so 7-7-7-7 wouldn’t even be possible, but let’s consider other “non-random” draws like 1-2-3-4-5). Why is this relevant? Because there’s probably some set of people who deliberately avoid “patterns”, and also some set of people who deliberately target patterns. The people who deliberately target patterns will be (approximately) equally relevant in either sort of game, but the people who deliberately avoid them will be much less relevant in Powerball than in Pick 4: “Obvious patterns” probably make up a few percent of all Pick 4 combinations (depending on precisely what patterns you consider “obvious”), but they’re only a tiny fraction of a percent of Powerball combinations, so a person who’s truly randomly picking numbers is very likely to “avoid the patterns” anyway.
Or to put it another way: Suppose that there are a million people who play the lottery, and of those million, 10 are the sort who would pick 1-2-3-4 or 1-2-3-4-5, and everyone else deliberately avoids 1-2-3-4 and 1-2-3-4-5 (either they’re deliberately avoiding all “patterns”, or they’re picking some other pattern instead). In the Pick 4 game, we’d expect, on average, 100 people on each combination, so 1-2-3-4 would be underrepresented by a factor of 10. On the other hand, in the Powerball, we’d expect that, even with a million players, most numbers would never get picked, and very few would be picked twice or three times… but here’s a number that’s being picked 10 times, and so 1-2-3-4-5 is overrepresented by a factor of a hundred or more.
Yes for the statistics to work it must have been a smaller lottery. I was just pointing out that at least in certain cases, probably in the past, Commasense’s strategy made sense. Of course now that a number of people have read the study and are trying to second guess the population its likely to have the opposite effect for the reason you describe.
An analysis of picks over times would probably decrease your chances of splitting and increase your average payout. But I suspect anyone capable of doing such a study wouldn’t be playing much in the first place.
BTW, the October 24 New Yorker has an article on the evils of lotteries, which I’ve just started reading.
I remember hearing (possible urban legend) that one year a major statistical meeting was held in Los Vegas, and the hotel that hosted the event was upset because the meeting attendees didn’t gamble.
My uncle, a professor of physics, told the same story about a physics conference.
Yeah, it sounds like pure BS to me. You can be a statistician and still enjoy playing the slots (or whatever your game of choice is.) Plenty of my math-inclined friends still like a long weekend in Vegas.
I went on a recruiting trip to the University of Illinois once where we had lunch with one of the world experts in combinatorial mathematics. We bought a few lottery tickets. We won.
But I said not play much. It’s the difference between playing for fun and playing because you think you might win something.
I’ve heard the story about the American Physical Society, too, and I can believe it. For starters, most people who visit Vegas do so specifically because they want to gamble. Those are the people that the economy of the city is designed around. People who are there for a conference, any conference, are thus probably already gambling less than the typical Vegas tourist, because they’re drawn from a typical cross-section of the population, not the most-gambling segment of the population. And then if the conference is specifically for a group all of whose members understand the math involved, the gambling is probably going to be even lower yet. Still not zero, but it could very easily be at a low enough level that it was net negative on the casinos’ profits.
I’ve heard it from the SDMB’s own jshore, who IIRC heard it from his graduate advisor. Indeed, the 1986 APS March Meeting was held in Las Vegas and AFAICT they haven’t been back since:
The odds of winning Powerball are appropriately 292 million to 1 and a ticket costs $2. Therefore, you should not buy a ticket if the estimated payout is below $584 Million.
The odds of winning Mega-Millions are appropriately 302.5 million to 1 and a ticket costs $2. Therefore, you should not buy a ticket if the estimated payout is below $605 Million.
In Powerball the numbers run from 1 to 69. For Mega-Millions it runs from 1 to 70. For either game, if you stick to dates (1-31), you are avoiding over half the possible hits.
Right, your expectation value doesn’t become positive till that point. Of course, you really need it to be in the ~$2 billion arena once you’ve figured in the reduced payout for taking cash and taxes.
But, that’s assuming that you are going to play until you win. You will never spend more on the lottery than the pot can win for you, so any win of any jackpot will put you into positive territory.
Yay! Positive expected value for my lottery tickets! Time to invest my lifesavings.*
*Note, this is sarcasm and nobody has to explain the math to me.