Wrote for Luck
Some interesting comments on frequencies in the National Lottery. I stopped playing when it went up to £2. I figured a pound wasn’t too high a price for a small frisson of excitement when the draw was taking place, but two pounds was too much…
Fans of probability love random processes. And lotteries are a great example of random number generation.
The UK National Lottery ran in one format from 19/11/1994 until 7/10/2015. I was talking to somebody who had played the same set of numbers in all of these lottery draws and I wondered what the net gain or loss has been for them over this period.
The basic format is that people buy a line of numbers (6 numbers, from 1-49) and try to match the six numbers (from 49 balls numbered 1-49) drawn from a machine. The aim is to match all six balls and win the jackpot. The odds of this are fantastically small (1 in ~14 million), but if they are the only person matching these numbers they can take away £3-5 million. There are prizes for matching three numbers (1 in ~56 chance), four numbers (1 in ~1,032), five numbers (1…
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In the Dark 
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