Fascinating

[archived_user]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

 

[archived_user]

The picture in that article reminds me of Chris Parnell from the SNL “Chronicles of Narnia” digital short…

 

[archived_user]

Interesting article…my only contention is the article never mentions how he’s able to screen the tickets. I’m no scratch-off aficionado, but every gas station I’ve seen them at has them on a roll behind a counter and the cashier rips them off from the top. I imagine asking for 50, spending 10 minutes inspecting them, and handing back 30 would ruffle some feathers.

 

[archived_user]

Cool article, but I’d be fine with $600/day.
I stopped at a gas station last summer on the way to do some camping. I always buy a few scratch offs when I’m on a road trip. Anyway, a young couple was working behind the counter and I asked them which scratch offs they liked to play the most. They asked me if I just wanted to win, duhhh of course I want to win. So they gave me five different scratch offs from different rolls and I won on each ticket. I bought a few more of their recommended tickets and won on all of those as well. If it wasn’t $$$ it was a free ticket.
I’m not sure exactly how they knew which ones would be winners, but there was something in the coding/barcode of the tickets that they were able to pick up on.

 

[archived_user]

$219k pa. Beats doing the CEE EFF AYY.
Anywhere outside of Ontario should be fair game. I can go to the local stores here and pick em up. Just need to figure out the stats now.

 

[archived_user]

comp_sci_kid Wrote:
——————————————————-
> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/a
> ll/1
Read the entire thing. Awesome story, reminds me of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” by Roald Dahl. Except it’s real, and therefore far more awesome.

 

[archived_user]

comp_sci_kid, I haven’t seen any comments from you concerning the events in Egypt yet.

 

[archived_user]

Why numbers from 1-39 chosen for each spot on the tickets?
They have 8 tic-tac-toe boards, so that’s a total of 72 spots, but they fill them with numbers from 1-39. If I understood correctly, the problem was that for them to control the number of winners, they choose a winning card by putting some “chosen” numbers in one row or column. Since they were basically manually choosing these three numbers, they were no longer random.
However, if the numbers were from 1-99, for example, that (wait a second!) would even be worse for them, because they would be more likely to be singletons. Wow, I think this was some serious flaw. Comments?