81–90 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironic? no; sad? yes.
I find irony in the fact that if the populous were better educated, the state would get less money. While not strictly true (a better educated populous would probably earn more, and give more taxes to the state, among other reasons), I find the idea on this small scale amusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last thing the lottery people want is a lot of attention to the flaws in their games. Threatening the whistleblower would cause that.
The cynical bastard in me thinks that There Is A Chance To Beat The Lottery is the best headline a lottery PR team could ever hope for. It is like card counting in Vegas: a problem if and only if you can do it well .
I wouldn't have been surprised if they had known about the 'flaw', but didn't mind it, because, as Srivastava said "it wasn't worth the time to abuse the flaw". In similar vein, I once randomly generated 2 million out of 40 million possible codes. Consumers would buy products, obtain a code and it would allow them to 'buy one, get one free' for some other product. The code being short and without the usual mixup cand…
He said he could make $600/day doing this. Even if you only do this 5 days a week and give yourself 2 weeks of vacation, you still end up making $150,000/yr ($600/day * 50 weeks/yr * 5 days/week). That's well above the national average for both the US and Canada.
More generally, other than saying "statistics," what specific fields of math are applicable to a problem like this? I'd guess there's some relation here with cryptographic attacks and attacks against pseudo random generators, but what specifically would one study to understand these types of problems?
Can someone describe the statistical analysis that would be required to discover something like this? Is it along the lines of guessing different parts of an algorithm till you find something that agrees with the data (IE He'd have to guess that only "singletons" could form winning entries and go from there)? Or, are there some more general approaches here to draw out correlations between the structure of visible num…
All you need is some basic knowledge of statistics, uniform distribution, etc. I don't see a need for high-falutin' cryptographic analysis and higher order math.
If you're dealing with online stuff, then some knowledge of PRNGs can help. I remember (a long time ago) hearing about some online poker algorithm which was just calling rand(), and had been seeded with unix time. That leaves a really small number of possibilities to try, and you can reconstruct the stream of random numbers it would generate.
I wish the article had talked about the legality of doing this. Assuming I'm not doing this to launder money and that I report all my earnings, is this legal?
Not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if the law that creates and regulates the lottery doesn't include a clause to make buying tickets by an algorithm illegal or something like it.
There's no law which says that "if you can figure out how the lottery works, it is illegal". Their recourse is to only pull the lottery and discontinue it; they can't accuse you of fraud if you somehow figured out how to pick the right tickets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...but you can teach the technique to someone who is not so smart. Or you can use the technique to launder money.
Or you could write a Beat The Lottery iPhone app. (OCR plus counting... I somehow think they can make it work.) There are a variety of business models available at that point.
The lottery system can now confidently continue to extracting money out of idiots who don't know better. Somehow this whole story leaves me feeling that nothing good has happened. The whole story just feels like a good Samaritan helping a schoolyard bully steal change out of the back pockets of unwitting classmates. A happy ending would be the lottery system managers getting thrown out after suffering unexpected sust…
I wish the article had talked about the legality of doing this. Assuming I'm not doing this to launder money and that I report all my earnings, is this legal?
Can someone describe the statistical analysis that would be required to discover something like this? Is it along the lines of guessing different parts of an algorithm till you find something that agrees with the data (IE He'd have to guess that only "singletons" could form winning entries and go from there)? Or, are there some more general approaches here to draw out correlations between the structure of visible num…
My guess is the following. Lets say that the numbers in the game are in the range [1..N]. Lets further assume that there are M slots (or squares where numbers are placed). Suppose M is about 3*N. So, on average, you'd expect each number to occur 3 times. If you see that number occur only once in the (visible) column on the right, then you are pretty sure that it'll occur at least once or twice in the (hidden) column…
Also, that seems to indicate the issue is due to the overall structure of the problem of choosing numbers for a game like this, while I got the sense from the article that the problem was more due to the algorithm the company used to control winners and losers (maybe I'm wrong on that). If it is due to how the company controls wins in some way, I could see how observing 3 in a row of singles more often than expected by a random distribution (whatever the distribution is for choice of number and choice of spot on the board) is a giveaway to some nonrandomness introduced by their algorithm. But if you were to approach it by finding divergences from this distribution, wouldn't you need a lot of tickets before you could infer this?
In any case - any guess on the expected number of tickets you'd have to have to discover a flaw like this?