There's another story you have to read: The luckiest woman on earth: Three ways to win the lottery (http://harpers.org/archive/2011/08/0083561). It's for subscribers only, but it's far more interesting than the Jonah Lehrer piece. It's about a woman who's won the lottery (scratch tickets) 3 or 4 times, winning millions each time.
It's been a while since I read it, but as far as I recall, one of the hypotheses about her good fortune (other than luck and some form of inside information) is that she had analyzed how winning tickets are distributed among batches (by cracking the pseudorandom number generator), and tracking which stores are likely to get packages containing winning tickets by the shipping routes.
I find it disturbing that some poeple find it so hard to belive that it might just be chance. It's way more likely to be that. The serial number on the cards are either generated in series (1, 2, 3 ...) or just pseudorandom, but they are not tied to any winnings, it's just a series of numbers so that they can keep track of what goes where.
If it's a serie of numbers you have to find out what the chances of a winning ticket in X-amount of tickets, meaning that you statistically have a chance of a price within the range of X-amount of tickets. But the way they have made it, you statistically have to spend more money than you can win in order to do so, or just about break even.
Now, the fun part is that most of these tickets (atleast where I live) come with pseudorandom serie numbers, so even finding the system in how the numbers are generated is going to be hard, if not even down-right impossible given the sample-size you will be able to buy.
And last but not least, lottery makers are not stupid. They've known about this since the dawn of time. Actually some credit the math behind statistics to gamblers. And you have so many level of pseudorandomness to crack, so, when you're done, statistically we can say that the lottery made it's money anyway, and you probably spent more than you won. And the lottery agency just have to change one constant and they are, from your point of view, totally random again. It's a cat and mouse game you cannot win.
It would be so trivially easy for them to obfuscate the numbers beyond any reversibility. Seeing the general belief on HN that you can hack any arbitrary lottery with some trivial math is pretty disappointing.
There is something to this. I had to do some training years ago at Alberta Lottery in Canada. Scratch tickets are sold in blocks of $100 (100 x $1, 50 x $2, etc).
We were told that each pack contains at least one winning ticket (it might be $5 or it might be $100K).
Are you considering doing card counting (enter a shop, watch people buy and scratch cards, and start buying after a large streak of non-winning cards)?
Otherwise, I do not see what that information (if it is true) would give you.
I was working at a place that sold these tickets. If you could keep track of each pack that was sold, you could get to the point where you knew your purchase would be a winner.
Obviously not something a person who didn't have the ability to monitor the purchases could do.
i believe the point is that the there is a pattern to the distribution. we can only safely assume the pattern is on a micro level, but it would suggest there are larger patterns at play.
for instance, is it possible to ship 5 rolls with million dollar winnings to the same store in a week? maybe the answer is yes, but i imagine there's a reason to prevent this. in case it's not clear i am just guessing. i don't really know what i'm talking about.
"but it would suggest there are larger patterns at play."
That, I do not see. If there are some guarantees as to having guaranteed prices per roll, one can see the lottery as the sum of small, per-roll lotteries, possibly combined with a larger one to distribute the truly large prices. There is no reason to assume that those per-roll lotteries will be correlated in some way.
that would definitely be an effective way to exploit the weakness, and if the value of your time is low enough, it would be profitable. A slightly more efficient way to exploit it would be to have the shop owner as a friend and have them tell you when a large non-winning streak has occurred.
It's been a while since I read it, but as far as I recall, one of the hypotheses about her good fortune (other than luck and some form of inside information) is that she had analyzed how winning tickets are distributed among batches (by cracking the pseudorandom number generator), and tracking which stores are likely to get packages containing winning tickets by the shipping routes.