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In response to
"(Not suspicious at all!) 433 people in the Philippines won the lottery last week. The winning numbers were 9 18 27 36 45 54 -- (link)"
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decline
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"But there are hundreds of lotteries every day around the world, and statistically it would not be surprising that every few decades,
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Oct 4 '22, 09:26
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Terence Tao, a maths professor from University of California, Los Angeles told the BBC that a pattern like this being a winning series of numbers is rare "for any single lottery".
"But there are hundreds of lotteries every day around the world, and statistically it would not be surprising that every few decades, one of these lotteries would exhibit an unusual pattern," he said.
"It's similar to how in any given hand of poker it would be unlikely to draw a straight flush, but if one looks at hundreds of thousands of hands at once then it actually becomes quite likely that a straight flush would be drawn," he added.
It's not the first time a lottery has seen an unusual pattern or sequence of numbers drawn.
They're just randomly drawn numbers. Humans looking at the numbers seeing patterns in the numbers doesn't mean that they're not random.
I've always thought that the modern technology allowing for players to instantly look at the history of something like a roulette wheel is one of the greatest ways that the house gives the player more (useless) information and thus gets players to play more on the mistaken belief that they have some control over the game. Every spin in a separate event. Assuming a fair set up and that things are random, then the past has no impact on the future as every outcome has an equal chance to happen as in every space on the wheel is equally likely to happen. Given that the spaces are marked in ways that are not equal (one / two zeros vs red / black) then those not equally marked spaces have different probability but again the past doesn't predict the future.
Course I'll probably bet on some 13-14-15 seed when March rolls around so what do I know ;-)
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