A Canadian geological statistician came to the realization that the numbers on some scratch lottery cards could not be random. “It wasn’t that hard,” Srivastava says. “I do the same kind of math all day long.”
He discovered that the numbers on the card before scratching provided information about the numbers underneath the latex. Specifically, he found that "singletons" - numbers present only once on a card - were likely to indicate the location of a successful scratch. After cracking the code, he calculated that he could win about $600/day if he spent full-time buying and scratching cards. Instead, he took his information to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.
A sample card is shown at left. Details of his logic and calculations are explained at the Wired link.
Link.
"... I start looking at the tic-tac-toe game, and I begin to wonder how they make these things,” Srivastava says. “The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”
He discovered that the numbers on the card before scratching provided information about the numbers underneath the latex. Specifically, he found that "singletons" - numbers present only once on a card - were likely to indicate the location of a successful scratch. After cracking the code, he calculated that he could win about $600/day if he spent full-time buying and scratching cards. Instead, he took his information to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.
A sample card is shown at left. Details of his logic and calculations are explained at the Wired link.
Link.
Comments (7)
"And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from..."
And the reasons why Mr. Srivastava told the Lottery about his discovery ("why on Earth did he do that?") are also explained in detail at the Wired link.
Neatorama posts are in general not meant to be comprehensive storehouses of information; we want people to go to the primary link sources to read more information in depth.
That's why we include "link" at the bottom of every post.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/texas-woman-wins-millions-lottery-fourth-time/story?id=11097894
By the way, she graduated from Stanford University, and taught math for 10 years. Obviously it's not just luck. She clearly has figured out weaknesses in the design of the scratch tickets, just like the Canadian statistician in the story here. The difference is that she kept the money, unlike the statistician who TOLD THE LOTTERY ABOUT HIS DISCOVERY (why on Earth did he do that?).
People who figure out weaknesses in casino games, even if they aren't cheating, are soon expelled from the casino. Lotteries are more tolerant.
It's not as bad as the engineering, where its pretty much all male. : P
XD
The thing is that many *science nerds* that i study with seem to have no clue about what they are doing or why they are doing it. Most of them are afraid of *disappointing their parents. Some just drift along because doing math and science is the only thing they know. Being a science nerd does not prevent you from having sex. Having that narrow mindset, being under great pressure from your parents, being clueless about world outside of *go to uni-geta good job-become successful* is what actually isolates those people from society.
(female Engineer 20+ years who has quit to go into Art)
What was studied? What were the controls for comparison? How was it blinded? The paper seems to indicate self-selection for starters, with a massive bias towards women responding over the boys.
There's some great science going on out there...and yet this is what newspapers latch onto? *sigh*
Athon
OK, but what about most sexually active with the opposite sex?
Then again, I'm studying interactive media design, so maybe I'm a mix of both.
Wana go out for drinks? ;)
this probably means that they cancel eachother out and you have a 'normal' sex life.
either that or the nerds* you draw with are too scared to talk to you and you have a.. less sexy sex life..
I don't know for sure cuz
I'm a male art student and a nerd and ain't gettin' any..
:\
There was an interesting phenomenon where sometimes you found yourself socializing a guy (on how to interact with women) only to have him be a better boyfriend for someone else.
I do want to point out that, at least when I was in college (yes years ago), the chinese and korean guys didn't lack for dates because they often had contact with others through ethnic student groups (like the chinese student association) but they could hold conservative views about sex.