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Here’s $100. Can you win $800M at Powerball?
- lintiness 11y agoyes we can!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tortilla 11y agoI lost my entire paycheck.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- baldeagle 11y agoIsn't this the wrong problem? It lets you enter X dollars, then it simulates if you played $1 on X numbers of sequential drawings... which would have terrible odds. Wouldn't it be better to simulate X numbers on Y draws, which would lead you to know the number of times/people would have to play to win. I don't think probability is communicative, is it? EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cableshaft 11y agoAgreed, I want to play where I can put as much money into it for each drawing, and then it simulates that, not one ticket one drawing. I'm not doing this in reality (I spent $2 for a pool, woo), but I'm curious to see it simulated.
- pavornyoh 11y agoI have fun idea.. How about all the people on hacker news put $2 in the HN lotto pool:). So I am assuming there are over 50k people that read? Can you imagine if the people on HN win powerball, it will set a precedent. Now, that will be fun:).
- fapjacks 11y agoYes, it absolutely is. Buy two tickets, your chances double. This is the "don't play the lottery, dummy" for dummies, which is good advice for people that think they have anything more than an infinitesimal chance of winning, and/or pour more than five bucks into a single play.
- jchendy 11y agoIt's also not clear what the end condition is. I edited the source so that it always picks my numbers, and it just keeps going. So far I've spent $2,734 and won over a trillion.
- cbhl 11y agoIt stops when balance = 0, i.e. you spent $x + all your winnings on lottery tickets.
- aetherson 11y agoRight, which is some bullshit. I mean, they cheated. Yes, it is mathematically provable that a random walk will eventually touch 0. That would be the case even if the lottery was strongly positive expected value. They ask you to comment if you won. Their program guarantees you lose when it terminates -- even if you hit the 1:292,000,000 odds.
- vorotato 11y agoThat's not true. 1) The title is can you win 800 million in powerball. If you passed 800 million, you win congratulations you did it. 2) It can be impossible to reach 0 even with a random walk.
- cbhl 11y agoI think you want to be more precise about "impossible". It is not mathematically provable that a random walk of finite length will eventually touch 0. Proof by counterexample: the set of every walk of length 1 where you win the jackpot on your first try. However, consider an infinite random walk. You can fix the first n values of the walk to win the jackpot as much as you want, but as the random walk progresses toward infinity, it is highly probable that you will be on a random walk that tends toward negative infinity. (You might have to play a lot; $437 million of $3 tickets would probably be enough tickets to play powerball for a few lifetimes.)
- elf25 11y ago
- cbhl 11y agoBut there are only two drawings a week, right? If you only bought one ticket with the same six numbers for every single drawing in a year, you could only spend 532$3 = $318/year on lottery tickets. If you wanted to spend $100 on tomorrow's $800M prize, you have to buy 33 tickets against one set of winning numbers.
- QuotedForTruth 11y agoIts not exactly the same but its pretty close when the chances are so low anyways. Playing 10,000 times in 1 drawing gives you the probability of winning the jackpot: 0.00003422297813=10000/292201338 Playing 10,000 times in 10,000 drawings gives you the probability of winning the jackpot: 0.00003422239258=1-((292201338-1)/292201338)^10000 The difference gets more significant if you play more. For 10 million plays its: .0342 vs .0336 If you play only 100 times the probability of a jackpot is the same to 7 significant digits. -edit I put it on $1M and let it run. I hit the 5 numbers, $1M prize, at some point around $150k spent.
- bradleyjg 11y agoIf you play quickdraw you could get the same numbers twice. I think with that caveat the odds should be the same.
- ethbro 11y agoTo be fair, wouldn't the odds of QuickDraw picking the same numbers twice (even if there weren't a built in limit against that) be the same odds as winning the jackpot in the first place?
- QuotedForTruth 11y agoOnly if you are only picking two sets of numbers. If you are doing 10k sets, the last set has a 9999/292M chance of being the same numbers as one of the other sets.
- bradleyjg 11y agoRight, that's the birthday problem.
- LanceH 11y agoIt evens out on expected payout. There is a chance on 10,000 sequential plays that you win the lottery 10,000 times.
- sandworm101 11y agoIs this an article or an attempt to harvest paycheck information?
- baldeagle 11y agoIf it is, it is going to be skewed. I just put in $292,201,338 (the 1 in .... odds for the jackpot).
- Vraxx 11y agoAnd funny enough this doesn't guarantee that you'll even hit the jackpot in that total. Man the lottery can be fun! (to be clear I'm not implying that you said that total will guarantee a jackpot win)
- maxerickson 11y agoThis is a fascinating sentence: While the large jackpot prize may be tempting, it's extremely hard to have that one ticket in 292 million. I think my favorite part is that extremely hard isn't a very accurate description of how unlikely it is.
- jchendy 11y agoPoker players and literature do this all the time, much to my annoyment. "It's really hard to make a flush" ... no, it's really easy just not very likely.
- bradleyjg 11y agoI saw a theory somewhere that human beings aren't very good at intuitively understanding even large order of magnitude differences between unlikely events. We have a mental category of "unlikely but not impossible" and slot everything from one in a thousand to one in a billion into that bucket.
- cableshaft 11y agoI.e. the Lloyd Christmas bucket (Dumb and Dumber). "You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?" "More like one in a million." "So you're telling me there's a chance!"
- m-i-l 11y agoTo put it into perspective, a bookmaker in the UK offered odds of 14 million to 1 for Elvis Presley crash landing in a UFO on top of the Loch Ness monster[0]. [0] A quick Google returns a number of sources, but I'm going to use this one: http://www.elvisnews.com/news.aspx/gamblers-give-up-on-elvis-being-alive/6838#.VpAdJHOnzqA http://www.elvisnews.com/news.aspx/gamblers-give-up-on-elvis...
- trevyn 11y agoHow much did he have to pay to insure those bets?
- 11y ago
- MrKristopher 11y agoSpent $115,698 Won $10,598 Win/loss $-105,100 Balance $0 ROI: ~10%
- praneshp 11y agoIs ROI profit/investment or revenue/investment? http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp says its the first one.
- blatherard 11y agoThe ROI would be (10,598 - 115, 698) / 115,698 = ~-90%
- revoohc 11y agoNo, 10% ROI would be $115,698 + %10. What you have here is more like a -90% ROI.
- unepipe 11y agoif ROI was 10%, winnings would have been ~$127k
- phibit 11y agoSpent: $100 Won: 0$ Win/Loss: $-100 Balance $0 ROI: ~1,000,000%
- cableshaft 11y agoThe comment on the site where some people play when it's a high payout more for wanting to participate in the cultural event (i.e. go see Star Wars in theaters) than the expectation that they'll win makes a lot of sense. I think that's mainly why I get a few tickets sometimes when it gets super high, even though I know my chances of winning are significantly worse and my chances of winning at all are almost nothing.
- Splines 11y agoMore people buying doesn't change your chances - it potentially lowers your payout. Makes me wonder if getting more people to play higher jackpots ends up evening things out in the end.
- Vraxx 11y agoIt may even out from an expected value for the purchaser point of view, but the profits keep climbing for Powerball the more people that hop on the bandwagon.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hebleb 11y agoI think most of us realize that they're not going to win, but when the jackpot becomes a national event every 6 months or whatever, there's usually some joy in buying a ticket anyway
- oniMaker 11y agoThere's more joy in giving $2 to a person who needs it.
- dragontamer 11y agoMake that $5. $2 doesn't even get them a sandwich anymore.
- hebleb 11y agoThose things aren't mutually exclusive
- oniMaker 11y agoUnless your goal is to maximize joy.
- drdoooom 11y agowhy not both
- unethical_ban 11y agoFor you.
- rdtsc 11y agoThe obvious equivalent for the HN crowd: "Here is $50k. Now quit your job and start a start-up" Difficulty bonus -- startup idea is generated by a Markov chain and could be anything -- "Uber for dogs", "Taxidermied pets as drones" etc.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 11y agoLottery as a service
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- n0us 11y agoGet a $1 lottery ticket mailed to you in a nice cardboard box every month for only $11 dollars a year.
- codazoda 11y agoPretty sure this would be illegal, but as a resident of a state where I cannot buy a lottery ticket, I'll buy.
- LanceH 11y agoI wanted to sell used lottery tickets for half price. The expected value of each ticket is higher than the regular lottery and it isn't gambling.
- trevyn 11y agoInclude some ad fliers and this could actually work.
- wingsonfire 11y agoMay be peer to peer lottery tickets as service. I have heard friends/colleagues used potlucked money to buy tickets and if they win share the prize. Have a service for it with nice Web 2.0ish dashboard :P
- ixtli 11y agoLottery is a progressive tax on stupidity.
- ssharp 11y agoThat's a pretty reductive way of saying it.
- ixtli 11y agoI agree though if you've worked in the casino industry as long as I have there's precious few other ways to reason about what's going on in the minds of people who don't understand gambler's fallacy.
- mattmanser 11y agoYou can't dream if you don't play.
- raverbashing 11y agohttp://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic
- ixtli 11y agoThis is actually not strictly applicable: what SMBC is talking about is a game that is some portion gamble but for which there is a house edge or strategy that you can exploit for gain. A lotto drawing is purely random (read: no skill) so someone with sufficient understanding of the math is no better off than someone who writes in random numbers. The same is true for slot machines.
- eljimmy 11y agoI don't agree with that. I have a friend who plays solely for the entertainment. He doesn't gamble on anything else in his life. He knows full well it is very unlikely he'll ever win, but he enjoys the excitement/fantasizing that it provides him throughout the week.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- elwell 11y agoIf only real life had chrome dev tools console such to modify global vars like "winTotal = 100000000".
- csours 11y agoWell, kinda: http://www.fox5ny.com/news/63367774-story http://www.fox5ny.com/news/63367774-story
- mmanfrin 11y agoQuestion: With a jackpot of $800mil and the chances of winning 1 in ~300mil, could you not buy 300mil tickets? (Excepting, of course, the risk that someone else wins and the cost of taxes).
- jbondeson 11y agoThe cash payout is ~$500 million, and after taxes you may end up with $309 million. So, yeah, probably not a winning strategy.
- nandhp 11y agoWell, it sounds like you'd be at least $9 million richer than you were before. And gambling losses are tax deductable, up to the amount of your winnings, so if I understand tax deductions correctly wouldn't you be taxed only on about $200 million of the cash payout? https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419.html https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419.html https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Taxes-101/Can-You-Claim-Gambling-Losses-on-Your-Taxes-/INF14370.html https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Taxes-101/Can...
- meric 11y agoIf you operated it as a business the lottery tickets are tax-deductible, so no taxes.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoThere's also approximately a 90% chance that you'll have to split the prize. (estimates are that over 400 million tickets will be sold)
- acomjean 11y agoYou could. Lamentably I don't have 300 million lying around. I think there is a limit on # tickets purchased. When there are cracks in the lottery games there are people who do find ways to exploit them.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jdhawk 11y agoBuy a $2 ticket for entertainment, not "investment." Spend 10 minutes imagining what you'd do with $496M. It might be fun.
- jaynos 11y agoJoin lottery pool at work. Might lose $2, but won't have to kill myself if everyone at the office wins and I have to show up everyday remembering that fact.
- elbigbad 11y agoReally I didn't even enter the office pool for years, but then started. $2 is worth the bonding with your coworkers.
- redcalculator 11y agoI find that it's more enjoyable to not join the pool and then buy myself a lunch when the participants inevitably lose. I make sure that everyone knows that it's a celebratory lunch. And then I wonder why I don't have any friends.
- willis77 11y agoI'd like to see the mathematicians ascribe an expected value on the bitter, icy glare of your envious colleagues as you eat that sweet victory lunch.
- LordKano 11y agoWe had an office pool for Wednesday's drawing and one of the guys in my area declined to participate. I joked that there was now a 292.2 million to 1 chance that tomorrow, he'd want to jump off of a bridge. Fortunately for him, we didn't win anything.
- zem 11y agoi wouldn't take a lottery ticket if you gave it to me for free, but i'd happily join an office pool. for me, the worst part about lotteries is the mental effort required to hang on to and track a ticket; it's sort of the opposite of the entertainment effect that people talk about. but if i could contribute some token amount of money to a social bonding endeavour, and as a bonus fund the entertainment of people who do enjoy keeping track of lottery tickets, and maybe magically have money appear without my having had to do anything for it, it would be worth it.
- aus_ 11y agoFree YC 2016 application: Build website to crowdsource $292,201,338. Buy all the lotto tickets. Pay back investors 150% of their investment. Make ~ $69.5M. (assuming lotto tickets are a $1) (someone else can figure out the break even point after taxes)
- johnpowell 11y agoHope someone else didn't win cutting the prize in half.
- cookiecaper 11y agoDon't forget the risk that there may be multiple winners, which would require splitting the jackpot.
- pc86 11y agoIt's not called Venture Capital for nothing.
- jonlucc 11y agoI imagine you'd have to crowdsource the purchasing as well. Asking a clerk to spend several days printing tickets might put them off.
- KingMob 11y agoSomething like this happened in Virginia in early 1992. At a certain point, the jackpot/(cost of buying all numbers) ratio was high enough that an Australian business group swooped in, hiring volunteers to purchase as many tickets as possible. They only managed to cover 5 million out of 7 million possibilities (ran out of time), but they still won the lottery, winning a $27 mil jackpot.
- malbs 11y agoIt's a genuine scalability problem when you have to work out how to physically print/place that many tickets, and the mechanism by which you distribute the jobs up to all of your volunteers (are they volunteers if they're being paid?)
- lotsoflumens 11y agoThe awful paradox of lotteries is that every week somebody wins, but every week that will not be you.
- codazoda 11y agoI started with their $100 "gift", then moved to a paycheck, then to my annual salary. By the time I was in that deep I decided what the heck and got a second mortgage on my house. TIL I have a gambling problem.
- pc86 11y agoDon't worry, your luck is bound to turn around. Any day now.
- worried_citizen 11y agoI recently purchased a OneRNG trng and decided to give it a chance at guessing the right number with its quantum-noise super powers. Reading from it overnight produced 24 million guesses and no winner. Though several were just one number off. Too bad so sad. I'm really curious what RNG the registers use when people say "let the computer guess for me". I'm pretty sure they don't all have a TRNG installed on the circuit...
- dsl 11y ago"Quick Pick" numbers are not generated at the store. Regardless of if you pick the numbers or let the computer do it, your request is sent in real time back to a lotto office where the real ticket is securely generated (with a TRNG if you so choose). The local terminal then receives a bitmap to print out.
- worried_citizen 11y agoDo you have a source for this? I'm extremely curious. Random number generation is a fun problem.
- dsl 11y agoIt is based on my reverse engineering of a lottery terminal. I can't vouch for the quality of the RNG, as I alluded to in my previous comment, but the local RNG isn't used in any meaningful fashion. I can point you in the direction of the MontaVista Linux distribution, which is what most of the terminals run.
- s73v3r 11y agoFunny that they allow multiple people to pick the same numbers, then.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoFunny that they allow multiple people to pick the same numbers, then. Why shouldn't they? It's to the lottery's benefit. Two reasons: 1) People are attached to "their" numbers, and would be very upset if you didn't let them pick exactly the ones they want. Alienated players equals lower participation. 2) There are more overlaps when people pick than when the computer picks. Which means that, each drawing, there is a lower probability of someone hitting the jackpot than if all numbers are distinct. Which means the money rolls over and the next drawing has a larger prize. Eventually the prize is $800 million and people get excited and buy even more tickets. It's even being discussed on HN.
- JayJee 11y agoSooo I hit the $50,000 after only $2,000. Apparently that is almost 1 in a million. Scary
- neogodless 11y agoWhoa, I'm still working on spending $100k... Spent $62,630 Won $5,793 Win/loss $56,837 Hovering consistently just below losing 90 cents on each dollar.
- onion2k 11y agoI ran the $1000 simulation, and then just before running a $100,000 simulation I stopped myself because I'd be distressed if my simulated numbers came up and I didn't actually get the prize. I'm bad at maths.
- Zikes 11y agoHere's some interesting insight into the random numbers behind this toy, if you're on Chrome: http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/12/theres-mathrandom-and-then-theres.html http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/12/theres-mathrandom-and-...
- dakr 11y agoGiven the long odds, I find that just imagining winning the lottery is still fun and decidedly cheaper than the real thing.
- jonpaine 11y agoA lottery ticket doesn't buy a chance, it buys a pleasant daydream. It buys a mental escape hatch. It buys the 'what would I do' game for another week. A movie costs $12 in a theater for 2 hrs of enjoyment. A lottery ticket costs $1 for a week of intermittent enjoyment. For certain segments of the population, a lottery ticket is a downright bargain. Math problems are easy. Real world problems are difficult. As an aside, it's so important that people who care enough about a social challenge like the lottery/gambling addiction are able to find the ACTUAL root cause to address. I'm not blaming the LA Times. I LOVE content like this - and not all content needs a purpose. BUT - if the purpose was supposed to be helping people who play the lottery see their folly, this probably isn't the right tack.
- ikeboy 11y agoWhat do you think of http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/hm/new_improved_lottery/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hm/new_improved_lottery/?
- ChicagoBoy11 11y agoI don't know what he thinks of it, but everyone should give these two pieces (especially the second one) a read. I was absolutely ready to hate it given the title of the first one (I, too, am in the "buying a dream" rationality camp), but the second piece especially was just too damn good.
- scotty79 11y agoWe have lotteries that give you this hope over period of time (albeit shorter). It's radio lotteries. You send them text (paid). And they pick few people to call back and to inform them that they won.
- wmil 11y agoFor the first article the "a sink of emotional energy" needs some proof that it's harmful. Without that it's just the author's opinion. It's very easy to argue that the fantasy helps people de-stress and ends up improving their lives. Studies have found that depressed people are better at estimating odds. There's decent evidence that too much reality is bad for your emotional well being. The second article is even easier to dismiss. To generate excitement the buy in has to be high enough that people feel a bit invested, and the result has to be quick enough that people don't loose interest.
- HugoDaniel 11y agoI won!!
- glenntzke 11y agoI'm genuinely surprised by the popular opinion that people play lotto only to win a nearly impossible jackpot. I rarely play, but when I do it's during the big frenzies like this just for kicks but with decent chances making my money back with a bit extra. I spent $3 (powerball single + multiplier). I won $4 last night by getting just the multiplier right (1:39 odds). The Mega Millions games has 1:14.71 odds of winning. I'll play both Powerball and MM once or twice a year and my loose accounting on my winnings lands me around +$4. Basically nothing over the years but I have enjoyed the frenzy. I don't think I fall into "stupid tax" territory and I do understand the probability of a jackpot win. I just don't care about it and enjoy the little rush of the chance.
- juddlyon 11y agoI saw the headline and thought it was a startup parable with the $100 representing VC money and $800M a huge exit. I need to be less cynical!
- nikolay 11y agoI'm sure if you put $100 in stocks, you get much better odds to make a fortune!
- charlieflowers 11y agoI clicked "play $100" 4 times and lost. So I clicked "bet paycheck" and entered $10,000 (no I don't really make that much). And boom, I won $1,000,000. So I guess I should start playing the lottery? (I suspect there's a bug).
- Wingman4l7 11y agoNo bug -- I've put $15,000 through it and only netted a tenth of that.
- santaclause33 11y agoI am in the hole 250k
- scotty79 11y ago500k down the drain 91% of invested money lost
- dplgk 11y agoI better approach is to pick numbers and then show how those numbers would have never hit a jackpot since lottery's inception.
- scotty79 11y agoLittle more than 90% of money lost. Still beats some of my stock market investments.
- ericfrederich 11y agoHere's the year 2016, can you make a site that works on mobile?