Winning the lottery
From SusoSight
| Number: | 12 |
| Date created: | 2001-08-27 04:51:59 |
| Previous Thought: | This old copyright law. |
| Next Thought: | Going back to school. |
| Voting results: | Yes: 12 |
Last week the powerball jackpot reached $295 million. As usual when the jackpot gets over $100 million or so you will hear scorns of people who don't usually play the lottery saying "Yeah, I want to get a piece of that action, I think I'll buy a lottery ticket because $100 million dollars makes it worth it."
In my opinion, most people would kill someone for a million dollars if they could get away with it. A million dollars is enough to make anyone happy. So why is 100 million any different. Each person's chance of winning is the same each week no matter what the jackpot is. But yet people keep on playing different numbers each week most of the time based on birthdates, etc.
Random numbers are probably the dumbest thing that you can play. You're better off sticking with one number over time and waiting for the winning numbers to come to you. To make an analogy (which I love to do), the chances of dropping a quarter from a plane 40,000 feet in the air and having it land directly on top of another quarter lying on the ground are better than winning the lottery.
The most strategic way to play would be to get a list of all the winning number sets going back to the begining of the lottery and look for trends. Rule out using any sets that have already one because they probably won't come up again unless there are sets that have repeated. If there are any columns of the set that do repeat, try going with the numbers that repeat the most. If you could get the list of numbers into file with comma separated list of values for the columns of a set, then you could use the awk, sort and uniq programs to generate a list of the highest occuring numbers.
I'd be the first one to say that bettering the chances of winning a million dollars is worth doing a little work.