[Spridgets] The Lottery - off topic

[bjshov8 at tx.rr.com]

There is a whole science involved in the study of random numbers, and it is hard to make them truly random.

Someone mentioned time, and that is a variable that might be significant.  My contention was that the first person in line got a certain set of numbers and the second person got another set, but since these machines are networked across a large region, if the guy had spent a few more seconds determining which candy bar he wanted, it could have changed the outcome of which numbers he got.  It's still random and until the winning numbers are drawn, any given set of numbers are as good as any other set of numbers.

There is only one thing you can say for certain about a lottery- the person that wins is the person that bought a ticket, the people that don't buy tickets will never win.


> Random numbers from a machine (aka computer) are not random at all, but
> determined by the number generator's algorithm.   For any given seed, the
> generator always returns the same sequence of "random" numbers.
> Statistically-minded geeks refer to them as psuedo-random numbers.
> 
> - Tom
> 
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 12:54 PM, <bjshov8 at tx.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > It depends on what type of ticket the guy bought.  If both people bought
> > what we call a "quick pick" where the machine assigns numbers for you, and
> > they bought the same number of tickets, then his position in line would have
> > affected his results.  The machine doesn't know who is buying the tickets-
> > it prints out one ticket with random numbers, then it prints out another
> > ticket with random numbers.  Whatever person got the second ticket got the
> > winning numbers.  It could have just as easily been the opposite- where the
> > ticket with the winning numbers went to the person that cut in line ahead of
> > him.  If the person had not cut in line in front of him, the winning ticket
> > might have gone to someone in line behind him.
> >
> > The randomness is that before the winning numbers are drawn, both tickets
> > have the exact same odds of winning so it doesn't matter which ticket you
> > receive.  And a person's position in line is a part of the randomness that
> > plays into this.  If you drive to work one day and a rock hits your
> > windshield you could think "if only I had driven earlier, or later, or taken
> > a different road...", but if you had taken a different road you might have
> > been hit by a truck.  You never know and you will never know because you
> > can't take it back and do it a different way to check for a different
> > outcome.
> >
> > The same with the decks of cards- the first deck of cards produces a
> > certain card, which goes to the first person in line.  The second deck
> > produces a certain card, which goes to the next person in line.  Each person
> > has the same odds of receiving a specific card as the other person.  Or the
> > card that each person receives has the same odds of being the one drawn from
> > a new deck by the lottery officials.
> >
> > It is only after the numbers or cards are drawn that their significance
> > might change.
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