4 ms·
Picking some high numbers is good, but you have to be careful about picking all high numbers, since many other lottery players have also heard of this strategy.
by jmharvey 13y ago
Picking some high numbers is good, but you have to be careful about picking all high numbers, since many other lottery players have also heard of this strategy. In a 6/46 game, of the 9.3 million combinations, only 5005 consist entirely of numbers higher than 31, while 736,281 are entirely "birthday" numbers. So if for every 150 people who play birthday numbers, there's one person who thinks they're outsmarting everyone and plays all high numbers, they're not actually improving their chances of picking an unpopular number.
- scarmig 13y agoIdeally you want to pick the set of numbers that's least likely to be shared with other players. However, the data used to derive any algorithm you use to determine that set of numbers will be publicly available. That makes me wonder what's the best meta-algorithm to use when deciding on algorithms to use. Any good way to improve your number generating process is likely to be used by other people, ipso facto. And even if you try to derive a process that takes that into account, the more powerful your process is, the fewer the number of people it would take to moot your strategy. And yet some processes--pulling numbers off of a fortune cookie--are genuinely horrible. Which seems like a mind-bendy paradox to me. There's this odd space between using a simple random number generator and using some kind of smart algorithm to do it that seems good. But the very fact that an algorithm exists to choose sone set of numbers seems to negate its value, so it seems almost beyond us to beat a random number generator.
- sopooneo 13y agoI bet choosing randomly is going to come very close to being ideal. The amount of numbers that other people can buy up will be an insignificant.