A discussion of telephone psychics lead to the question ‘If they were really psychic, why don’t they gamble instead of working on a phone for strangers?’ (the reason probably being because they have no true predictive powers). I started considering what would happen if someone could predict the weeks Pick 6 numbers and used their power to repeatedly win the lottery.
There have been cases of previous lottery winners winning again, and maybe even consecutive wins, but I’m talking about a situation where someone has all the numbers 3 or 4 times in a row. I’m sure they would be investigated to make sure it wasn’t some kind of scam, but if it was proven that there was no collusion between the psychic and the lottery officials and that the games were fair, what could they do about it? The lottery would still make money if one person always won, but people would figure it out quick and it would probably reduce it’s popularity. Could the psychic be prevented from playing? If so, how? Buying lottery tickets is a pretty anonymous deal. Would this be important enough for the psychic to ‘disappear’ into some top secret government lab for further research?
Winners go through a process of verification before receiving any money. So that’s an easy way to filter out the cheaters or whoever seems to be sucking up the cash.
I think the OP is considering the situation where the winner quite legitimately continually wins, through the use of psychic powers rather than cheating.
My bet? Everyone would stop playing unless they knew the person in question or knew he/she wasn’t playing, including by proxy.
It’s really simple. All the other people who want to win would hunt the Psychic down and lynch him (or her).
I’ve heard it said that the best way to commit suicide was to go downtown and hold up a sign that says “Won the lottery twice and wasted all the money. Please help.”
I think the lottery would refuse to pay, on the grounds that it MUST be cheating due to the impossible odds of it happening through chance. In fact, I think such a case has already happened. A Casino in Montreal refused to pay the Keno winnings of a player who won several times in a row. They had no idea how he won, but their argument was that the probability of the event happening through chance was essentially zero.
As it turns out, the casino lost and had to pay. And it turns out that the guy wasn’t cheating, but had figured the game out - the machine was designed for a 24-hour casino, but the casino there closed every night. So they shut the power off. Unfortunately for them, the random number generator in the machine started from the same seed every time the power came on, and therefore always gave the same sequence of numbers the first time the game was played. A guy noticed the flaw, and bet accordingly.
That’s some shoddy programming, that I have used myself. I would use the internal clock for the seed of a random number generator in my old BASIC programs when I was a kid (back when we still used line numbers). It’s a good idea unless the program starts up automatically at a fixed time, as this one apparently did.
Designing a properly random number generator for games of chance is no trivial matter. There was a recent case of an online casino that screwed their up - they were using the system clock to generate a seed, and it limited them to a repeating pattern that only allowed for something like a million different combinations when shuffling decks of cards.
Some hackers figured out the pattern, and wrote a program to generate all possible decks. Then they built a search engine to rapidly eliminate possibilities as cards at the casino were exposed.
So, the players would get dealt two specific cards. A lookup would quickly return the subset of all decks that had exactly those two cards in those two positions. As more cards were exposed, they would narrow down the set until they were left with only one deck. At that point, they knew exactly which cards every player was holding, and which cards would be handed out on the turn and river.
Needless to say, this gave them a huge edge over the other players.
IIRC, this actually happened. Someone who won over one million later won a half-million. The lottery had to pay out, but there was such an outcry the winner gave up playing.
Well, you’d think after winning the lottery at least once the people would be satisfied. But noo, greedy bastards have to go and suck up all the money. Won’t let anybody else have a turn at it. It seems rigged to me.
But hey, if you’re winning, keep playing. It would be really cool if someone won like three or four times. Although the possibilities are next to impossible, it would be something to see. Media would eat it up like a tub of meat.
