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I think this is an important point. I think someone asked "what's the probability this number is chosen?" and many people respond with 1 in 42 million or someth
by idolaspecus 6y ago
I think this is an important point. I think someone asked "what's the probability this number is chosen?" and many people respond with 1 in 42 million or something like that. But in fact this is only true under the assumption the lottery is implemented perfectly. But this assumption is what is under scrutiny here. Because the lottery is not some ideal process in the mathematical universe, it's a process in the physical universe implemented by humans. Because it's a real process implemented by humans, there's all sorts of ways we can imagine the results could be skewed by the implementation details, and we can imagine all sorts of outputs that might be more likely given the most likely flaws in the implementation.
- jkingsbery 6y agoYeah, it's not a question of what is P(X=5,6,7,8,9), it's P(Someone is cheating | X = 5,6,7,8,9). In any case, there's probably a few people out there who picked "1 2 3 4 5" that are kicking themselves extra hard.
- Spooky23 6y agoTrue, but it’s random enough to make analysis difficult. I’d be more worried about lack of transparency and poor controls on the part of the game administration. The secretive organization that runs one of the big lotteries requires NDAs for everything and is super secretive, but lacked internal controls to prevent an insider from rigging the game.