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A game with a windfall for a knowing few

boston.com

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Re: A game with a windfall for a knowing few

#41

Post by bumbledraven »

nonymousse wrote: post #37
bumbledraven wrote: post #21

Mark Kon, a professor of math and statistics at Boston University, calculated that a bettor buying even $10,000 worth of tickets would run a significant risk of losing more than they won during the July rolldown week. A $2 Cash WinFall ticket allows you to pick a set of 6 distinct integers from the set {1..46}. The lottery commission then picks six distinct integers at random from the set {1..46}, effectively by draw…

Which company has this as a hiring problem?

Past tense. They don't have that hiring problem posted any more, but it was for mathematicians/software developers in the R&D group. If you're asking because you have an approximate solution, let me know (email address in profile) and I can put you in touch with people there who would be very interested to see what you've come up with.

Re: A game with a windfall for a knowing few

#44

Post by markmarknewyork »

jacques_chester wrote: post #3

State-owned lotteries transfer wealth from one group of people to another group without any coercion. I don't see why private individuals can't participate in the transfers also. More generally, this is an example of how simple changes (the rolldown) can have surprising consequences. TBQH I'm surprised the lottery operators aren't just keeping the surplus funds rather than doing a "roll down".

According to the calculation by Hao Li in 2006 (should be at MSU that time) (see Hao Li's article at http://www.jofamericanscience.org/journals/am-sci/0201/06-li...):

By knowing the total tickets Ntt each time, Pjh can be estimated easily: Pjh=1-(1-P6) Ntt Lottery P6 is the probability of matching 6 numbers. In the case of the WINFall lottery, P6=1/13,983,816. The total tickets Ntt each time can be estimated by its samples and their probabilities. The WINFall lottery has 4 samples, matching 6 numbers N6, matching 5 N5, matching 4 N4 and matching 3 N3 respectively. N3 is the largest sample of the WINFall lottery. As far as we have four samples in hand: N6 N5 N4 and N3, we use N3 to calculate the total tickets. Because the more sample are there, the small differences we have (Statistics Accuracy). The Ntt is: Ntt=N3/P3 P3 is the probability of matching 3 numbers. In the case of lottery WINFall, P3=1/57.

To win is really practical.

However, government should make more money than buyers even following the abave rule.

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