A friend of mine wants to know why if you let lotto numbers fall in to the barrel the same way every time, in the same order, the same numbers don’t always get drawn out.
I told him it had to with the chaos theory, temperature of air, etc.
This correct?
Because there’s absolutely no way to put them in the exact same way, with the exact same velocity, at the exact angles, so that the same parts of all the balls collide with each other, and so on…not to mention that the balls are not drawn at the exact same time each night (and never could be), so there’s too many variables. Pretty sure that’s what chaos theory seems to dictate, but yeah. Ask him to drop 3 tennis balls on the floor (one on top of each other, the way the columns of lotto balls are) in the “exact same way” and see where they end up. Mark those spots, and then do it again…I guarantee he won’t have the balls in the same spots.
Jman
“Chaos theory” is a generic name for situations in which miniscule changes in the input parameters lead to large-scale changes in the output. A very very simple example would be the difference between two large numbers:
1,000,000 - 999,999 = 1
1,000,000 - 999,998 = 2
So we’ve had a 100% change in the answer for a 0.0001% change in one of the input parameters.
The lottery balls follow the same principle. If you could know exactly what all the inputs where (shhh… nobody wake up Heisenberg), you could predict the result. But there just isn’t detailed enough measuring equipment on Earth to do that. And tiny little changes in those inputs lead to massively different answers.
All okay?
pan