Derren Brown to predict lottery results on live TV. How?, page 1

Originally posted by harpsounds

Originally posted by king9072
If he nails all the numbers then he's done something lame, if he gets a few right then hes gotten lucky. There are many ways to make more informed choices while playing the lottery, but require a lot of software to track all the past winners and trends and hot and cold numbers.

If I understand you here, I think you're falling into the classic gamblers fallacy. Just because the number 41 (for example) has been picked out more times, that does nothing to effect the odds next time. Even if 41 came out as a number 10000 weeks in a row, it would still have the same odds.

No computer software can help you in this regard.

Now, perhaps the kind of thing you are hinting at, is if you track the machines, and the sets of balls, perhaps tiny imperfections in the balls/machines might effect the odds very slightly, but I don't believe it's to a level where you could ever use that to your advantage.

en.wikipedia.org...

[edit on 7-9-2009 by harpsounds]

Mathematical odds tell us that every single time that a draw is done, the odds are always the same. Technically, the exact same numbers could be picked twice in a row, but it's unlikely. Just like a lottery could draw every day for thousands of years and never have the same winning numbers.

But, for the people who are into playing the lottery professionally, they have noticed that there are definitely ways to increase your edge. As you speculated, I guess the effects on the balls over time could become a contributing factor.

Regardless, these people have compiled all known lottery draws on the planet (all results are publicly available, and most are online) and they notice that trends appear.

At the end of the day though, I am not one of these people, and I do not waste my time playing the lottery. But there are apparently ways to improve your odds, but I think it's still an amazingly huge long shot.

7 numbers, of 1-49 gives odd's of 1:86,000,000.

OR, in other words, it would take you 1.6 million years for your lucky numbers to hit playing them once a week.

Or if you could figure out a way to play every single day, 365, you're looking at a wait of about 236,000 years.

GOOD LUCK

Thats why even if Darren Brown is able to correctly pick a few winning numbers its still impressive. And if he knocks it out of the park and gets them all, he's definitely doing something lame.

On a side note, I think it was in australia, a guy hired I think 20 retailers to constantly print tickets attempting to cover absolutely every possible combination cause the win was huge.

For some reason a few stores were unable to print tickets at the critical moment, and he was only able to cover I think 60-70% of the possible combinations. But he still won

That's the only way to win the lottery, playing every combination - or a #load of them

[edit on 7-9-2009 by king9072]

[edit on 7-9-2009 by king9072]