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Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

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Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#41

Post by msellout »

nullflux wrote: post #21
nullflux wrote: post #19

You're making the (probably) false assumption that your lottery is as broken as the Ontario one. I question your detachment if you are calling gambling an "investment" at all. If you want to win at probability games, look at what any professional gambler does and stick your money down only when you can prove or reasonably expect to see a positive expected value given your odds. That's how basic strategy in blackjack…

Also: Can we really call this a "regressive tax" like the Wired article states? There is no obligation to play the game. You are obligated to pay taxes. Numbers games (lotteries) are run by governments now because organized crime was running them in inner cities. People still played then. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game At least the "tax" from lottery proceeds often goes to benefit social goo…

Calling state lotteries a regressive tax highlights the irony of the socioeconomic system. The non-lottery-playing cohort tends to have more political control and uses that power (unconsciously, perhaps) to structure the market to induce lottery-playing behavior among the poorer cohort.

In other words, there are varying methods of obligation.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#42

Post by msellout »

insidius wrote: post #12

Your sample size is ridiculously small. Also, the fact that lottery companies are well and alive contradicts the very theory.

Let's be a little more helpful: the sample size is small relative to the feature space. We even have more variables than observations.

A sample of 43 observations might be reasonable if there were few independent variables and these variables had relatively few possible values.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#43

Post by jvdh »

colindowling wrote: post #40
evan_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the guaranteed way to make money from a lottery is to be the guy selling tickets.

Selling lottery tickets can be a losing proposition. In many states, the vendor has to pay for the whole roll as soon as tickets containing half the prize money have been sold. So if I have a roll of 500 tickets costing $5 each, and the first ticket is a $5000 winner and the rest of the tickets only cumulatively win $4999, then I have to pay for the entire roll even though I've only sold one ticket.

They tell you when that happens? Sounds like something that could be easily abused by collusion among a few shopkeepers.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#44

Post by jey »

colindowling wrote: post #40
evan_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the guaranteed way to make money from a lottery is to be the guy selling tickets.

Selling lottery tickets can be a losing proposition. In many states, the vendor has to pay for the whole roll as soon as tickets containing half the prize money have been sold. So if I have a roll of 500 tickets costing $5 each, and the first ticket is a $5000 winner and the rest of the tickets only cumulatively win $4999, then I have to pay for the entire roll even though I've only sold one ticket.

What a strange system, though I'm sure it makes the Lottery's actuaries a lot happier.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#46

Post by ComputerGuru »

loverobots wrote: post #38
jamesu wrote: post #4

I know of only one guaranteed way to win from a lottery: don't play it.

The problem is calling the lottery an investment. To me, at least, it's not. I buy maybe 10 a year, just for the hell of it and the "never know" factor, but I am never pulling my hair out at my so far horrible "investment decisions." You can look at the $10 as being 2-3 Starbucks coffees

You don't even count. You're not playing the lottery any more than I am by picking up a ticket I found off the street.

Just go to your local grocery store or gas station and stand next to the machine or cash register for just 30 minutes and watch the guys that buy a ticket. They're all regulars. They're all putting their hope (even if they tell themselves they're not) in this ticket being the winning ticket. They're buying 2 or 3 tickets a day which is money that most of them really can't afford to just be throwing away (and these are people that honestly would say they can't afford a Starbucks a day, by and large). It's very sad.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#47

Post by flashingleds »

I confess to trying this myself after reading the Srivastava story. If you step back from the fact that it's a lottery, there's plenty of money involved, "what are you a gambling idiot?" etc it's actually a really fun problem to tackle. I picked out a similar style of ticket and for $20 I kept myself entertained doing analysis and testing hypotheses for the better part of a weekend. Sadly I was defeated on this occasion having found no obvious weaknesses. The main thing I learned from it all was that while a single scratch ticket is fun and exciting, 5 or more get very boring very fast. I was groaning every time a 'free ticket' showed up.

(Also: in Australia you usually see the next 4 tickets on the roll behind a clear display, so if you ended up with a good trick, even if it required running a script on your smartphone, you could have fun with it)

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#49

Post by PaulHoule »

My sister-in-law found a winning bet for the New York Lottery.

There was a special promotion at the racino she goes to -- you could take your loser scratch tickets in a certain game to the casino, they'd put them in a big jar, and then whoever won the drawing got a trip to Las Vegas.

She saw there weren't many tickets in the jar, so she bought about $150 of these scratch tickets (she won $80 back so these only cost her $70) and submitted them. Her mom did about half as many.

A few days later her mom gets a phone call and she won a trip to Las Vegas worth $2000. Then she goes there and does some tricks with her loyalty card and now she's on an $800 junket.

I worked it out with decision theory and found that they had played the raffle almost optimally -- it blew my mind since I figured anyone who messed with scratch tickets and video slots would have to be completely impervious to probability theory.

Raffles, in generally, are good for people who play to win. My family regularly wins multiple prizes when they have raffles at the school because we're smart enough not to put tickets in for the Battleship game all the boys want or the hula-hoop all the girls want.

There's always some prize which is cooler than the muggles think that it is, and I'll walk home with it.

Now, you never see books about "how to win at raffles" because unlike Poker and Stock Trading, there's no motivation to suck in players who are just a little bit worse than you.

Re: Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

#50

Post by DanBC »

starfox wrote: post #7

People who design these games think about security. Sometimes (rarely) exploits get unnoticed and go into production. I'm confused about why we are supposed to believe that there is anything exploitable about this particular card?

(http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_...)

Even smart people using good software can make mistakes.

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