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South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn
- neom 6y agoI'm so curious what the chances of this happening are.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThe same as any other combination of numbers. It's just harder to wrap your head around.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redkoala 6y agoIt’s the same likelihood to draw the numbers, however more people are likely to buy that sequence of numbers as it is a very common sequence that people think of.
- jon-wood 6y agoExactly the same as for any other sequence of numbers.
- ptaipale 6y agoWhich is 1 : 42,375,200. However, the probability of ending up with a sequence like this is still quite low - probability of coming up with six consecutive numbers is 40 : 42,375,200 i.e. less than one in a million.
- ptaipale 6y agoCorrection: as pointed out, the sixth ball is picked from range 1-20, which more than halves the probability to less than one in 2 million.
- disown 6y ago100%
- singularity2001 6y agoUp to which resolution is a fundamentally deterministic world ruled out?
- jcranmer 6y agoAccording to the article (assuming you're looking at this particular sequence): > The chances of winning South Africa's PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200
- mattnewton 6y agoIf it's done properly, it's the same as any other sequence, right? I don't know how many balls they have and whether there is replacement to tell you the actual number, but there shouldn't be anything special about this one among all the other possible sequences, except that it's more likely to be guessed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- oh_sigh 6y agoYes, but there are vastly more non-incrementing sequences than incrementing sequences.
- fortran77 6y agoActually, it's more! 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 10,11,12,13,14,15 and even 2,4,6,8,10,12 would have had the same amount of attention and scruitny. So "what are the odds that a sequence of numbers would come out that would look 'funny' to many people" is now not one out of n, it's several hundred out of n.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI was thinking what's the odds that any number drawn will have a special relationship to the number drawn before, where the degree of specialness is determined by how many people hearing the number think "huh, that's weird"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 6y agoThe same as any other combination, as quoted in the article, 1 in 42 million.
- thehermit 6y agoThe question most people are probably thinking of is "What are the chances of any sequence of numbers being drawn?", not just this specific one in the article.
- ptaipale 6y agoAnd that is, literally, quite close to one in a million.
- madcaptenor 6y agoActually no, because this lottery picks five balls from a pool of 50 and then one ball from a pool of 20. So there are only 15 possibilities where the whole draw is six consecutive numbers (from 1-2-3-4-5/6 to 15-16-17-18-19/20).
- greenshackle2 6y agoDoes draw order matter in this lottery? Cause if not it's a lot more likely.
- denni9th 6y agoNo, in fact the numbers were not drawn sequentially but arranged in order after. The only exception is the powerball, the 10 in this case, which always is last in the draw and positioned last in the final numbers. This can be seen in the official announcement: https://youtu.be/11RN1pEnrTo https://youtu.be/11RN1pEnrTo
- hervature 6y agoYes, as others pointed out, this particular sequence is the same as every other sequence. Or, the one person who said 100% is referring to the probability of something that already happened. To give you a more charitable interpretation, the South African lottery Powerball can be 1-20 so there are 20 straights possible so 20 in 42,375,200. Or roughly 1 in 2,000,000 or roughly 40,000 years of weekly draws to see a straight.
- strombofulous 6y agoI think there are only 16 straights possible since you can't start with 17, 18, 19, or 20
- hervature 6y agoYes, you're right. In this case, the Powerball comes last. So increasing straights can't end with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. However, you could have wrap around straights. So 15 or 20 depending if you allow the wraparound.
- jerf 6y agoMany repliers are computing the probability of this exact draw, but probably a more relevant consideration of "this" is "the odds of a 'suspiciously regular' combination being drawn". The probability of one of those occurring is (the number of such sequences you name):42,375,200, or that number over 42,375,200. There is some inherent fuzziness in what you consider a "suspicious sequence", obviously. If you stick to entire sequences you don't get very many; however, if you consider "1 2 3 4 5" in the original numbers to be suspicious regardless of the bonus ball draw, then the number of such sequences starts going up fairly quickly. (Include things like [1,3,5,7,9], [2,4,6,8,10], [3,6,9,12,15], etc.) It's pretty easy to get up to a couple thousand "suspicious sequences". For the sake of roundness and being a bit conservative, let's say there are 423 "suspicious sequences", in which case the odds of hitting one are roughly 1 in 100,000. You may choose to add another order of magnitude of "suspicious sequences" pretty easily, in which case it goes to 1 in 10,000. Given the number of draws done for this sort of lottery (dozens or hundreds a day, I'd guess), it's inevitable that sooner or later one would be hit on lotteries of this size. Some of the challenge in weighting the number of sequences is they aren't all equally "suspicious". [1,2,3,4,5] is what most people would consider a "dead giveaway" (right or wrong), whereas [1,2,4,8,16,32] would probably bother fewer people. Some people might still find even [1,2,3,4,18,bonus 6] suspicious ("look how 'close' it was to 12345!"). So there's just some intrinsic fuzziness to the answer of how likely this is.
- mdavidn 6y agoIt depends on how many samples. The odds that this specific drawing would yield this result should be one in 42 million, but the odds that a lottery somewhere would yield this result in our lifetime is substantially greater.
- throwdour 6y agoIsn't the real question "what are the odds of the lottery being random if this suspicious sequence comes up so soon"? I.e. given a specific sequence, how many weeks should you expect to wait before you see it? In the extreme if you would expect to see 1,2,3,4,5,6 after 500,000 weeks, but you see it in the first week, then probably the lottery is not random, right?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- texan2945 6y agoIt's no more/ less probable than any other combination, right?
- macspoofing 6y agoIf the probability distribution gives equal weight to all the numbers, then yes. But the fact that a sequence that is semantically meaningful to humans (in such a profound way) came up should raise some questions, because there may be some funny business going on. At the very least, it you want to audit the lottery just to give people confidence it isn't rigged.
- fimdomeio 6y agoif you're a completely logic person then yes. I guess the problem here is that a lot of people will always think this was a scam as they do not understand that 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 is as likely to happen as 2 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. And there's there's the other step... if we can make people have this kind of thinking then very easily this kinds of games would end as people would figure out it's just a waste of money.
- jcranmer 6y agoI believe that the lottery in question picks a combination, not a permutation, and writes the combination in ascending order. But it's not particularly clear from the documentation.
- idolaspecus 6y agoI don't think you're correct. Imagine you code a random number generator and run it ten times and get the same number every time. A "completely logical" person would probably assume there's a bug in their program. In fact, this is basic Bayesian reasoning.
- idolaspecus 6y agoYes, but the outcome 5 6 7 8 9 10 is also evidence that something is amiss. If you can discern some structure in some random sequence of numbers, that's evidence that it's not random.
- danielamitay 6y agoDilbert comic strip: https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 "Over here we have our random number generator." "Nine nine nine nine nine nine" "Are you sure that's random?" "Thats the problem with randomness: you can never be sure."
- SahAssar 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- avalys 6y agoThat is my absolute favorite Dilbert.
- quickthrower2 6y agoRandomness is a weird concept, because if you roll a die it's random right? Unless you have all the physical variables - roll speed, angular velocity, height, shape of die, air resistance, air movement, temperature, etc to work out where it will land. So randomness is more a lack of knowledge. Randomness is that you are not sure. And I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to even comment on that, but that's some weird shit too!
- nsomaru 6y agoThere was an interesting discussion about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237356
- hprotagonist 6y agoThat's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
- tdy721 6y agoOh and have the boy change my luggage password!
- pmoriarty 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs ...for the curious.
- effingwewt 6y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k Because the scene is priceless
- herodoturtle 6y agoHaha thanks for this. So lost I was. Never heard of Spaceballs.
- PUSH_AX 6y agoHumans love patterns, meanwhile the RNG is just shrugging.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoScott Adams is a seditious traitor supporting a coup. Let's not give him traffic.
- macspoofing 6y agoPoe's law is at work here for me. I have no idea if you're sarcastic or joking around because there are a lot of crazy people that actually would believe something this ridiculous.
- unethical_ban 6y agoLet me moderate the radical's message above: Scott Adams went fully, publicly, into the Trumpian regime's alternate reality. It is a disappointment, to say the least. But using the t-word should be reserved for extreme scenarios, including some current politicians in American politics, though I will refrain from naming them.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoEntirely genuine. Look at his Twitter. He's gone off the deep end and is explicitly supporting a coup and spreading obvious lies. It gives you a perspective on how deeply negative the cynical intent behind his comics is. They're forever ruined. This isn't a controversial take anywhere in civil society. The fact that Hacker News collects so many conspiracy-minded anti-intellectuals these days should be a warning to PG about the culture he's fostered... -- reply-via-edit since I'm being rate limited: > Trump trying to usurp power like crazy people said was going to happen. He's literally been calling the governors and secretaries of state pressuring them to appoint electors directly instead of as a result of the election. How is that not "trying to usurp power" in an unprecedented way? "Both sides" are not equivalent here, and it is disingenuous to pretend so. The fact that Trump and his supporter are so incompetent that they can't actually accomplish it is a blessing, but that doesn't make their supporters any less guilty, just more pathetic.
- macspoofing 6y agoI think you have to get a grip on reality. I had no doubt that if Trump would lose the election, he would not be a gracious loser and would be on Twitter bitching about it until the day he dies. Lo and behold, Trump lost the election, and he's on Twitter bitching about it. What I don't see is any evidence of Trump supporters rioting, or engaging in violence, or Trump trying to usurp power like crazy people said was going to happen. Perhaps you should take a chill-pill? States are certifying election results (including Republican majority states). Trump is pursuing legal options, as he is entitled to. Pretty clear that Biden will officially become President-elect when the Electoral College meets later this month (By the way, remember when crazy people in 2016 were trying to get electors to not vote for Trump even though he won [1]?). So what's the problem? That Scott Adams is calling this election fraudulent? That's par for course. For example, every election that Democrats lose, is also labeled fraudulent, due to 'voter suppression', or Russian meddling or Diebold machines being hacked (remember that one from 2004? [2]). It's a 'meh'. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z0iuWh3sek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z0iuWh3sek [2] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-politi...
- FemmeAndroid 6y agoSo there are a few people mentioning that the chances of this happening are equal to the chance of any other set of 6 numbers coming up, but something I like to think about is how to estimate the size of the set of winning combinations that would trigger this kind of reaction, and what the chances of one member of that set being the winning numbers would be. So let say, a set of: - sequential numbers. - sequential primes. - sequential even or odd. - a commonly memorized multiplication table 3,6,9,12... - squares 2,4,8,16,32... - other famous sequences - eg fibonacci - famous numbers - eg 4,8,15,16,23,42 - the same numbers being picked multiple days in a row As a bonus, I like to think of the number of lotteries important enough to warrant making the news. Then you can calculate how frequently you can expect to see a 'crazy lottery winning combination' story.
- hervature 6y agoDepending on how you count, famous numbers isn't exactly a well defined category, the number of special sequences will be less than 100 and certainly less than 1000. Regardless, very small compared to the overall number of sequences.
- Closi 6y agoI’m not great at maths, but back of fag packet let’s say there are 100 suspicious sequences, and there is a 1 in 15 million chance of winning the lottery - that’s 100/15000000 or 1/150000. Let’s assume that there are on average 2 lottery drawings per week per country, which means c400 lotteries. So 400/150000 = 1/375 chance per week, so it’s going to happen every 10 or so years.
- hervature 6y agoYour math is correct. I would say two draws per week is wrong but I'm not a lottery expert. Every 10 years may seem surprisingly often, but we are including sequences like 2,3,5,7,11,13 which most people wouldn't find special. Even 10,12,14,16,18,20 (double of this "special" sequence) I think a lot of people wouldn't care as much.
- yboris 6y agoI like how article URLs often have random numbers at the end of them. The current linked article has "55154525": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525 Would be just a lovely Easter egg if someone intervened and updated it to be "world-africa-5678910"
- herodoturtle 6y agoIf my company were hiring an SEO consultant I'd recommend you most strongly.
- ebg13 6y agoToo many people in these comments talking about chances of picking random sequences or randomly choosing runs of numbers. Not enough people noticing the part where it says "The organisers say the sequence is often picked." Often?
- PhasmaFelis 6y agoIt's hilarious that people assume this must be a scam. If someone figured out how to fix the lottery, why on earth would they pick such a distinctive sequence and split it 20 ways? They could have picked a more "random-looking" sequence, walked away with 100% of the jackpot, and no one would have batted an eye.
- pmoriarty 6y agoAh, but that's what they want you to think.
- herodoturtle 6y agoSome theories I've heard from my learned South African colleagues is that this was possibly a computerised system's glitch.
- londons_explore 6y ago"glitch" aka someone was running the testbench rather than the production code...
- rwmj 6y agoIt's reckoned in the UK that about 10,000 people every week choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as their lottery numbers. So it'd be really stupid to enter the lottery with those as your own numbers because you'd only win 1/10,000th of the jackpot. In this story 20 people shared the jackpot because of a common sequence. This seems to indicate that if you are going to enter, you should choose high numbers that aren't, for example, part of memorable sequences, dates, etc. So all numbers > 31. Avoid all even or all odd, progressions, etc.
- tosseuthansia 6y agoIt would have been sillier to not have played those numbers and won nothing ;) On a more serious note, if the EV of a lottery is positive, a winning strategy must be to only play unlikely numbers.
- hervature 6y agoYep, the same concept applies to Daily Fantasy Sports. Where you don't necessarily want to pick the best players. You want to pick the best players that no one else will pick. This is for the DFS games that have one player take all.
- opinion-is-bad 6y agoThe best rule to follow to avoid getting duplicate numbers is to just not pick them at all. Quick Pick is a common lottery feature that just gives you random numbers, and should give the best odds of choosing a number which no one else has. Any system your brain can come up with to choose “random” numbers is probably one that someone else came up with too!
- scarmig 6y agoIt won't give you the best odds. A trivially constructed strategy with higher expected value: A surprising number of people choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as their numbers. So, instead of a strategy of using Quick Pick, you could use a strategy of starting with Quick Pick and discarding the result until it's something other than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, which you then use. That has a higher expected value than Quick Pick by itself. The number of people using this strategy is dwarfed by the number of people using the "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6" strategy. This could be expanded to avoiding months, birthdays, etc.
- odyssey7 6y agoThis is why I tell people it’s inadvisable to buy a ticket with a special date or similar. You are no less likely to win, but you are more likely to split any winnings with another player who also bought that number, lowering the expected value of the ticket.
- londons_explore 6y agoMost people who consider the expected value of a ticket choose not to buy in the first place...
- smabie 6y agoThat's not true, it's pretty common in the finance/trading for the office to go spend tens or even hundreds of thousands when the lottery has a positive EV. I've seen brilliant people throw down thousands of dollars. Mostly because it's fun, but also because it's rational.
- tromp 6y agoWhile every outcome is equally likely, one can say that, a-priori, the odds of an easily described outcome is small. This is formalized in Algorithmic Information Theory [1] [2]. For instance, when flipping a coin 100 times, the odds of the outcome being describable by a 40-bit program in a predetermined language are only 1 in 2^60. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequenc...
- fractionalhare 6y agoYes, good point. It's also formalized in basic probability theory. The set of number sequences a human would find interesting or surprising is smaller than the set of all number sequences. If all number sequences are equally likely, by the third axiom of probability you're more likely to draw an uninteresting number sequence than an interesting number sequence. However that does change the problem statement; we do still expect "123456" to occur equally as often as any other sequence, interesting or not.
- pmoriarty 6y agoIsn't randomness a property of the distribution and not of any number in particular?
- goldenkey 6y agoMoriarty, namesake from Sherlock Holmes. Yes, that is correct. Infinite samples is needed to verify true randomness.
- dave333 6y agoThe news report quotes the lottery official as saying the numbers were generated by a computer algorithm that is used world wide. Maybe it was in test mode by mistake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjaB1JBfJLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjaB1JBfJLQ
- TwoBit 6y agoThe fact that it was using a known-good computer algorithm means little. Suppose an actor can set the algo seed and thus the generator can give you whatever results you want. Or the output is intercepted. So many possibilities.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y agoI suspect this to be a genuine random event rather than a 'fix'. If you were able to set the numbers and let your stooge know what the winning numbers were going to be... Why on earth would you pick numbers that were certain to draw attention?
- blueprint 6y agocould have been a hacker/whistleblower exposing an existing flaw in a plausibly deniable manner for his own safety edit: wait for morse code S-O-S :)
- colejohnson66 6y agoSo to prevent attention, choose “non-obvious” sequences. But then those end up being investigated more than “obvious” ones like this. So you would actually want to choose “obvious” ones to avoid suspicion! There’s a paradox related to this train of thought: the “unexpected hanging paradox.”[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y agoAh yes, reverse psychology. I considered that and then thought about triple reverse psychology and ended up with it's Turtles All the Way Down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_psychology
- rootusrootus 6y ago> Why on earth would you pick numbers that were certain to draw attention? Not only that, but sequences like this are significantly more likely to have many winners (assuming the lottery allows ticket purchasers to select their own numbers).
- triangleman 6y ago
- reaperducer 6y agoI'm not in a position to say that something funny is going on with South Africa's lottery, but coincidences do happen. Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, the Pick 3 came up with 9-1-1. Math happens.
- bdz 6y agoSimilar-ish story from Bulgaria back in 2009. 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42 were drawn back to back weeks live on TV. They also had a probe but nothing malicious have been found. RNG being RNG. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8259801.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8259801.stm
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoRNG doesn't do that. The probability is infinitesimal. It didn't happen by accident. Its fixed. I can say that with something like 99.99999% confidence. Which doesn't mean "See it could happen!". It means "No its never gonna happen"
- colejohnson66 6y agoSo because the chances of something happening are so infinitesimally small, it’ll never happen? Airplanes are orders of magnitude safer than cars, yet planes still crash. The “law of large numbers” and all.
- dave333 6y agoBut there are simpler explanations, like they broadcast last weeks drawing by mistake, and once broadcast, they can't undo it.
- dan1234 6y agoFTA: > The lottery organisers described it as a freak coincidence and pointed out that the numbers were drawn in a different order. So, not the same broadcast.
- bawolff 6y agoYes, if you get small enough (not saying we are neccesarily small enough here). If the probability was something like 1/2^512, and it happened, i think its safe to say that something is fixed.
- pgt 6y agoHere in South Africa we have plenty of reasons to investigate the lottopreneurs looting the corrupt lottery: https://groundup.org.za/article/hawks-set-special-team-investigate-lottery-corruption/ https://groundup.org.za/article/hawks-set-special-team-inves... But I can assure you this is not fraud, because our fraudsters aren't dumb enough to pick sequential numbers and draw even more attention to themselves.
- nerdponx 6y ago"That's the same combination I have on my luggage!" [0] 0: https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k
- tempysecret 6y agoHoe gaan dit, Petrus? > our fraudsters aren't dumb enough to pick... Maybe they are bored of getting away with it? I think the main other necessary data point is that this was an "electronic" lottery. There was a video somewhere (can't find it) where the National Lottery supposedly explains why "this isn't unusual". In the video they must have mentioned the phrase "random number generator" at least 5 times and never explained why the numbers aren't unusual. Brings to mind the people in the 2000s that built dice throwing machines and then piped the results to online random number services. Whatever was wrong with our classic lottery ball machine? PJvZ
- chadash 6y agonot to mention that they are sharing the prize with 19 other people. Would be much better to pick numbers that others are unlikely to have if you are trying to run a scam.
- lgleason 6y agoHmmmm given that a few years ago Zuma had a pool built at his house on the taxpayers dime and tried to say it was a fire pool nothing would surprise me.
- Ballas 6y ago> because our fraudsters aren't dumb enough to pick sequential numbers That is quite a claim you make there!
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMy concern is Why is the winner of the US lottery always in some out-of-the-place town in the middle of nowhere? The chances per-capita of the dart landing in a small town are microscopic, yet it happens all the time. Because its fixed. Somebody's relative.
- warent 6y agoSmall towns make up about 50% of the population in the US. Couple that with the fact that small towns also typically have lower income households which are more likely to buy lottery tickets, and you end up with basically every winner being in that demographic.
- vsef 6y agoSmall towns and rural make up only 21% of the US population. http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/documents/ts2010/ts-report/ts10_rural_people.pdf http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/documents/ts2010/ts-report/...
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI think its up to 40% as of this year?
- vsef 6y agoAs someone who lives in a small rural town I highly doubt that. The percent has been consistently going down over time, not up and covid housing movement is nowhere near enough for that large a shift in one year. Suburbs are significantly more people than small towns, and large metro areas in general hold vast majority of population.
- InitialLastName 6y agoYeah, but all the mid-sized cities (and suburban towns) on the news that aren't in my area are indistinguishable from small towns in the middle of nowhere.
- machinelabo 6y agoLottery should be illegal. It is a luck-based system to concentrate and redistribute wealth from individuals (often lower class) to a single member of the society; propelling one person from the lower echelons of the society to the top at the expense of others. We want to align some kind of a productive output and reasonable incentives for a person to justify amassing so much wealth.
- arcticbull 6y agoWhile I agree, I very much enjoy gambling because it is fun, and gets me the dopamine hit I'm after :)
- TrainedMonkey 6y agoA lot of fun things are fundamentally unproductive, risk taking and surprises that playing the lottery entail are fun to a lot of people.
- gt565k 6y agoWhich is why in the US at least, most states take about 40-50% of the lottery winnings to fund education programs. In Georgia, we have the HOPE scholarship which is funded by the Georgia Lottery. If you have a good GPA in high school, and you maintain it in college, you basically get a free ride and don't have to pay tuition. While the HOPE scholarship can probably be tailored, more towards the household income, from a distribution perspective, it still works well. It allowed myself and many of my peers to graduate with significantly less debt than if we had to pay for college ourselves.
- rootusrootus 6y agoTrue, but it still amounts to a very regressive tax, even if the proceeds are fed back into education.
- taeric 6y agoThe cynic in me notes that the stock exchange amounts to where moderate to middle class does all of their gambling. With most of the proceeds just consolidating up the wealth chain. At least in lotteries the programs are progressive. :D
- dave333 6y agoIf this were a true random event, then near misses with 5 out of 6 sequential digits would be far more frequent, but I have never heard of one. So that says this is non-random somehow.
- triangleman 6y agoconfirmation bias, availability heuristic
- chadlavi 6y ago"I've got the same combination on my lottery"
- szundi 6y agoThat's what you get when you don't pay the hacker who you hired for rigging the numbers.
- mikesabbagh 6y agoThis is complete luck, believe me!
- hansjorg 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: > the PowerBall jackpot draw require[s] players to pick five main numbers from 1 to 45 and one 'PowerBall' number from 1 to 20 for an entry fee of R5 per board As suggested elsewhere here, this could be someone who has broken the system trying to draw attention to the flaw. If that's the case, why choose this sequence then? Why not go for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?
- lmilcin 6y agoSetting aside idea of playing a lottery, if you insist on playing it at least do it properly. Don't choose any pattern of numbers as you are exposing yourself to having to share the win with other people. Don't choose a date as it is more probable somebody will also chose a valid date than a completely random set of numbers. Don't choose digits from your favorite irrational number, for the same reason. Ideally, choose numbers that no other person is likely to choose. Not exactly random. Maybe generate a random sequence and check if you can see a pattern, do a search on the Internet, etc.
- Fellshard 6y agoBetter to win a partial pot than none at all, yes?
- appleflaxen 6y agoyes, but that's not the right framing of the problem. if all outcomes are equally likely from the machine, but humans are more likely to choose numbers with personal significance. Therefore more tickets will be sold with 1-31 in them vs. higher numbers, and the expected value of your ticket will therefore be higher if you include numbers above them.
- laverya 6y agoBut if two numbers have an equal chance of being drawn, it's better to choose a pot you won't have to share.
- jessriedel 6y agoBut the suggestion in the article, reasonable in my opinion, is that this sequence was in fact favored for some nefarious reason.
- ldjb 6y agoThe drawing of these numbers is under question, but you would expect a significant proportion of players to select sequences such as this, even if it's not in their best interests to do so.
- tpoacher 6y agoThe probability of getting this exact combo may be 1 in 42,375,200, but the probability that you would have brought this combo at least once over the monthly competition's 11 year history is about 1 in 300,000. And also presumably the probability of humans selecting this particular combo is quite high due to the nice pattern.
- kbelder 6y agoPlus, how many distinct 'interesting patterns' are there? 1,2,3,4,5... 2,3,4,5,6... 10,9,8,7,6,5... if there are a hundred patterns that make people go 'wait a second', the odds of getting _one_ of those is a hundred times larger.
- seesawtron 6y agoThe book Foolder by Randomness talks about Fano Plane[0] and how it can be used to up your chances in Transylvania lottery [1]. The book changed my opinion completely about the intricate relationship between governments and lottery systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_plane [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania_lottery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania_lottery
- kazinator 6y agoThe question is, would these people launch a probe if 1 2 3 5 8 13 were drawn? If not, their behavior is inconsistent. It should be equally suspicious (possibly not at all) if six consecutive elements of any interesting sequence are drawn. The only good reason to investigate this is politics. That is to say, if six consecutive integers come up, and the lottery corporation doesn't make some kind of public show of investigating it, they risk inviting criticism from ignoramuses.
- crazygringo 6y agoDoes anyone have any idea how many daily "official" lotteries are drawn worldwide? I'd guess something on the order of 1,000 maybe? (One per country, plus a bunch more for individual states within countries?) I know they vary in numbers of positions and values, but I am kind of curious roughly how often you can expect a sequence of consecutive numbers (increasing or decreasing) to be chosen anywhere worldwide. As an initial guess, if it's 5 balls drawn from 50, a thousand times a day, then it's something like a ~13% chance to happen somewhere yearly. So since this is international news, and not the kind of thing that gets reported every year... it doesn't seem implausibly unlikely, no? (It's not like it's a once-in-a-millenia or once-in-earth's-lifetime kind of thing.)
- kbenson 6y agoDoes someone mind posting the math on this? I'm getting something like 775% chance it would happen yearly, but that seems too likely, and I think I screwed mine up somewhere, and wouldn't mind seeing where I made some wrong assumption in how to compute the probabilities.
- mrosett 6y agoProbability it happens is 1 in 50c5 (the number of ways to choose 5 balls out of 50.) So probability it doesn't happen is 1-1/50c5. Probability it never happens in a year is that number raised to (3651000). That gives 85%, so there's a 1-.85 = 15% chance that it does happen each year: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281-1%2F%2850choose5%29%29%5E%281000*365%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281-1%2F%2850choose5%...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brandmeyer 6y agoThis analysis is spot-on under the assumption of 1000 lotteries per day, although your asterisks are getting trashed by the markdown. To the other folks ending up with some wild results, there is a basic checksum on probability: If you compute the probability of an event happening at greater than 100% you've borked something up. Bug: They drew 5 balls from one pool of 50 with an independent draw from another smaller pool of 20, so you need ~~50 ncr 6~~ (50 ncr 5) * 20, not 50 ncr 5. Nit: I would rephrase your answer that there is a 0.85% chance that it happens one or more times in any given year. There remains a (vanishingly small) chance that it happened on every single random draw during the year.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoWeirdly this is an episode of BBC comedy show Rab C Nesbitt - he bets on the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 and that weeks winning numbers are 7,8,9,10,11,12. https://youtu.be/Nrmcxa1yBec https://youtu.be/Nrmcxa1yBec The accents maybe a bit hard to understand.
- jobigoud 6y ago> The accents maybe a bit hard to understand. Youtube auto closed captions agrees with this statement.
- kords 6y agoI just remembered about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEbn1NUvq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEbn1NUvq0 Number "21" shows on the screen before the actual extraction (1:06 & 1:38)
- usr1106 6y agoOther random results that have occured in real life: In Bulgaria the same numbers were once drawn in 2 subsequent weeks. In Germany the same numbers were drawn as in the Netherlands the week before.
- dwd 6y agoA typical case of people not really understanding randomness, and assuming there was fraud when it appears less random than they would imagine.
- sporkologist 6y agoIt's very hard to imagine a machine that could pull this one off. Was each lottery ball prepared with a weight that would favor it? What kind of mechanical scheme is even possible that could do this? An extremely precise lightning-fast hidden OCR-reading robot system? I'm on the side of "shit happens" for this one.
- nevi-me 6y agoIt uses a random-number generator, no longer a physical machine
- sporkologist 6y agoI couldn't find a source for that, but if they did that, they are screwed, because no physical chain of evidence (videos of the drawing, the actual lotto ball machine, etc)
- jobigoud 6y agoMaybe it's a PRNG and they first pick a random seed and keep that seed for verification.
- nevi-me 6y agoThe numbers weren't drawn out in sequence, but rather they're arranged in sequence after the draw (makes it easier to check). The article also didn't mention this, but a random-number generator is used. The older physical draw used to be audited, but I'm not sure if what happens now. There are a lot of shady things being done with the profits of the lottery, like non-existent charities being funded, it's basically a fund that gets looted. Even with that, the probability of this combination is 1/42 million. The draw has 5/50 and 1/20 powerballs. The best thing about this happening is that 99 people got the 5-9 numbers correct, so this was a good redistribution of funds. The prize was huge (114m), so each winner for a sizeable chunk. Was it rigged? I doubt it, but I welcome the probe, as there is corruption in the SA lottery (even down to the awarding of the contract to run it). I'm on mobile, so I didn't share links, of one would like them, I can add them.
- lazyasciiart 6y agoThe official who says this combination comes up "all the time" seems to be stretching the truth - according to this wonderful lotto results site, this is the second time since 2009 that the sequence 5-6-7 has appeared. But 9-10-11 actually is the most common three sequence....having happened five times. http://www.lotteryextreme.com/south_africa/powerball-statistics(8) http://www.lotteryextreme.com/south_africa/powerball-statist...
- lkxijlewlf 6y agoI've told the few people I know who play the lotto they should pick "1,2,3,4,5,6" and their faces screw up. I tell them it's just as likely. They don't believe me. I ask, then why are you even playing if you don't understand the game? That doesn't go over well.
- united893 6y agoI used to do the same. Told my mom to buy that ticket, and explained to her she was wrong. And that made her sad to realize. She buys the tickets because she enjoys the pleasure of forward predictions: what will she do with the money. Go to the bahamas, buy a villa. Relax. That forward projection means dopamine and norephedrine release -- similar to taking a drug. She enjoys that pleasure that's why she buys it.
- nlh 6y agoHear hear. That's exactly why I occasionally buy a lotto ticket or 20 when the number gets REALLY big. I consider $20 every year toward an hour of fantasizing about what I'd do with a $500M lump sum a worthwhile investment. ($500M lump sum...$250M after taxes...invested into triple tax-free muni bonds paying 2.5%....ahhhh...$521,000 a month for life...mmmmmm)
- inakarmacoma 6y agoNorepinephrine?
- mantap 6y agoIt may be just as likely to win but it's not just as good, the expected value of the prize is much smaller because the prize will be shared with a large number of people. Better to choose a random set of numbers.
- lkxijlewlf 6y agoBut that's a completely different point.
- djrogers 6y agoThis makes perfect sense - logical or not, human nature would lead society as a whole to mistrust a lottery commission where this happened. The only reasonable option here is to investigate the incident and hope to sway enough people back to trusting the lottery again. Public faith is far more valuable than any cost that could be incurred by an otherwise useless investigation into math.
- rllin 6y agodid nobody read the article lol > The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way. > It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot. that sequence happens, but multiple winners is rare so the combination of them is the concern here
- furstenheim 6y agoThis comes to prove the basic and probably only lottery strategy. If you choose (which you shouldn't) to play the lottery, then avoid common sequences like 5,6,7,8,9,10 or dates. In very unlikely case that you win, you'll most probably have to share the prize
- binarycodedhex 6y agoStraight flush, but I guess it's slightly better than getting 1-2-3-4. I'm curious if their TRNG-reading code broke and no error condition prevented aborting the draw.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoThis reminded me of when the NY lottery was 911 on September 11 2002.
- sahinyanlik 6y agoThis scam is not comparable to Turkish one. Same numbers drawn twice in row. https://www.turkishminute.com/2020/11/27/turkish-mp-hints-at-fraud-in-national-lottery-after-same-numbers-drawn-twice-in-row/ https://www.turkishminute.com/2020/11/27/turkish-mp-hints-at...
- sriku 6y agoIf you order all possible draws and assign an index to each counting up from 1, we can ask "which pattern is not suspicious" by index. The first such one we identify in that list (with the smallest index) will end up being suspicious for being the first non-suspicious pattern .. and that's a contradiction. So either all draws are to be suspected or none of them ;P
- aquarin 6y agoNothing compared to Bulgarian lottery, where duplicate numbers are drawn in two consecutive rounds. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8259801.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8259801.stm
- fungiblecog 6y agoSeriously, if you were going to fix it you'd pick a random looking sequence, not something that would draw attention...
- audunw 6y agoI wouldn't think that this instance is actually fraud in itself. That'd be way too obvious. It's not that odd that several people picked that sequence, people pick non-random sequences all the time. But what I imagine it COULD be, is that they have some kind of system that can deterministically generate a specific sequence of numbers. So once in a while they can generate a sequence that'll reward someone they know (or every time, but that'd probably be discovered quickly). Someone left that system in a test mode which generates the "5...10" sequence to demonstrate that the system works. But I think it's still more likely that the odds of a lottery somewhere in the world has some kind of interesting sequence is surpisingly high, as others here have said.
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- rdiddly 6y agoThere's something humorous about this. We're so suspicious to see order where we expect chaos. But 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 is as likely as any other combination. Order is a subset of chaos, not its opposite. In other words, even chaos produces order occasionally. And unless you believe in Creation, that's precisely the thing you owe your ass to. But it doesn't "seem random enough" to us. Seems like our experience/conception of randomness is kind of limited. Because we go around ordering things, we associate order with our intention, and extrapolate that if order arises frequently from our intention, therefore ALL order must be the result of human intention. Or going further, that all order has "meaning" encoded in it. But it's not true; order can exist "accidentally" without intention or meaning.
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- adultSwim 6y agoBBC is reporting on one random person trash talking online.