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A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

thehustle.co

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Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#31

Similar to the guy that bought a fighter jet from Pepsi but they reneged on their contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc .

There was no contract. The result of Leonard v Pepsico makes lots of sense read in the context of something like Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (the classic English contract law case every student learns).

In Carlill the Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. claimed it had never intended a contract to arise, that the advertisements were just "puffery" and no reasonable person should have expected (as Carlill did) that if they do what it says in the advert and yet they get Influenza anyway (Carbolic Smoke Balls were a bogus cure for flu) they can claim the £100 stated (then a considerable sum of money) like it says in the advert. The judge said well, why does the advert explain that the company has £1000 in a bank account? If there's no intention to pay people money, why did you make a bank account, put money in it and tell them about it? No, this is clearly a contract, you offered, she accepted by performance, now you need to pay the nice lady.

But Pepsico clearly doesn't expect to give out fighter jets. It doesn't have any fighter jets, and the depicted scenario is ludicrous, which is exactly the opposite situation.

We can see that - at least after the initial hype - John Leonard saw this as a profile opportunity more than a serious attempt to get Pepsico to give him a jet, when he's like oh, this shouldn't be a Federal trial, this should be in front of a jury of my peers, and I define "My peers" to be "The Pepsi generation" that's clearly not serious any more.

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#32
post #10

> Even if Mandel were to win, there was the possibility of multiple winners — a scenario that could significantly dilute the jackpot. In fact Mandel was not able to calculate the odds of multiple winners. With publicity about an outsized jackpot, the general public is also expected to buy tickets in larger numbers, making it hard to estimate the expected winnings. For that reason, I would not consider this to be gami…

> An interesting question is whether lotteries should publish the number of tickets sold...

Don't many State lotteries publish a "where your lottery dollar goes" breakdown - showing the percentages of ticket sales revenue going pay winners, going to support State programs, going to reseller commissions, and going to Lottery administrative overhead? With that breakdown, a history of the jackpot sizes, and some number-crunching, you should be able to get pretty good feel for ticket sales for each drawing.

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#33
I hate lotteries and gambling in general. Take from the hopeful, give to the lucky. And the house (almost) always wins. Yes, I have some respect for those who can game the system, because I like the house losing, but their winnings are still taken from the hopeful (or worse, the naive and stupid).

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#34
Voltaire made a fortune in more or less the same way in 1730 [1].

> This system worked best if a consortium of players bought tickets together and split the winnings, so, writes Pearson, Voltaire, de la Condamine and 11 compatriots teamed up and by June 1730, all had made a tidy sum.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voltaire-enlighten...

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#35
post #21

Am I missing something here? Are these lotteries +EV in the first place? How does the lottery expect to make money if that is the case?

There is a fixed probability of matching all numbers but the value of doing so varies, so sometimes the EV can be positive.

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#36

This might just be the best answer ever for that YC application question: "Tell us about a time where you hacked some system for your advantage?" Surely they would give this Romanian guy an interview based on this answer! /S

But did he really hacked it? Or just brutforced it?

Well he definitely hacked it logistically.

Basically what I meant: a bit of maths, a lot of logistics. To me that qualifies!

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#37
post #10

> Even if Mandel were to win, there was the possibility of multiple winners — a scenario that could significantly dilute the jackpot. In fact Mandel was not able to calculate the odds of multiple winners. With publicity about an outsized jackpot, the general public is also expected to buy tickets in larger numbers, making it hard to estimate the expected winnings. For that reason, I would not consider this to be gami…

> An interesting question is whether lotteries should publish the number of tickets sold... Don't many State lotteries publish a "where your lottery dollar goes" breakdown - showing the percentages of ticket sales revenue going pay winners, going to support State programs, going to reseller commissions, and going to Lottery administrative overhead? With that breakdown, a history of the jackpot sizes, and some number-…

Just throw some GPT at it and call it a day!

-

UI can't wait until we hear of the next level MIT geeks in vegas armed with AI glasses doing all the card counting for them, across many tables, decks, days, tourneys etc...

If there is one industry that should be afraid of AI nefariousness - it would be gambling.

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#38

I wrote this comment the other day, about something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36766556#36768937 Like with trading systems, the thing that made it work here was not being smart about the maths. In fact anyone with high school maths would be able to work out when it was worth doing. The thing here was the audacity to try to put together a business around getting it done. Things like getting investor…

I’ve come to believe that this is a universal principle: disbelief regarding feasibility prevents actualization of vision; once one sees that it is done it is as if a mental barrier has been removed.

Yeah, imagine all the people that are going to try it now, not that the path has been paved already.

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#39

This might just be the best answer ever for that YC application question: "Tell us about a time where you hacked some system for your advantage?" Surely they would give this Romanian guy an interview based on this answer! /S

But did he really hacked it? Or just brutforced it?

Brute forcing is hacking…

Re: A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery

#40
post #33

I hate lotteries and gambling in general. Take from the hopeful, give to the lucky. And the house (almost) always wins. Yes, I have some respect for those who can game the system, because I like the house losing, but their winnings are still taken from the hopeful (or worse, the naive and stupid).

> I hate lotteries and gambling in general. Take from the hopeful, give to the lucky.

Sorry, but you've just described the underpinnings of our current winner-take-most societal-wide economic systems. Every day, more and more of our systems are rooted in luck. Being born to the right family, getting into a prestigious university, getting a good job, timing the housing market, investing in the stock market, starting a business... Everything is "take from the hopeful, give to the lucky".

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