3 ms·

The numbers are probably generated using the time as the "random" seed. A lot of twin numbers have probably been generated but until no one noticed because they

The numbers are probably generated using the time as the "random" seed. A lot of twin numbers have probably been generated but until no one noticed because they didn't win.

simonb 17y ago
Moral of the story: buy tickets at "weird" times, to maximize your expected utility (assuming the pot is split among all wining-ticket holders). Same reasoning applies to lotteries where you pick numbers. Avoid primes, patterns, sequences that amount to dates and other magical/folk numbers.
- jncraton 17y ago
  If people who played the lottery understood math, they probably wouldn't be playing the lottery. :)
  - simonb 17y ago
    There are pathological cases where it can be mathematically rational to play. There just needs to be a sufficiently long streak of no winners (assuming pots accumulate).
scumola 17y ago
Yea, the typical programming 101 method to initialize a random number generator is to seed it with the current unixtime, so if both of these machines were using the same random number generator (the clocks didn't even have to be in-sync with each other), it's easy to assume that these two machines generated the same random number on the same second.