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National Lottery Lucky Dips...
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I have ranted about this before, but I'm going to again because I'm starting to despair of lucky dips .. I always have 2 lines and 8 out of 10 times I get at least one number repeated on both lines...
but today I was not firing on all cylinders and I ended up buying two two line lucky dips from two different shops..
On the four lines on the the two tickets
No 3 appears 3 times
No 12 appears 2 times
No 15 appears 2 times
No 22 appears 2 times
No 25 appears 2 times
No 33 appears 2 times
No 45 appears 3 times
That means of 24 numbers, 16 are duplicated... On lucky dip!
. This always happens... it doesn't feel at all random.. have you noticed this? 
What do you reckon my chances are of getting Camelot to check the randomness of their random number generator??
p.
but today I was not firing on all cylinders and I ended up buying two two line lucky dips from two different shops..
On the four lines on the the two tickets
No 3 appears 3 times
No 12 appears 2 times
No 15 appears 2 times
No 22 appears 2 times
No 25 appears 2 times
No 33 appears 2 times
No 45 appears 3 times
That means of 24 numbers, 16 are duplicated... On lucky dip!
. This always happens... it doesn't feel at all random.. have you noticed this? What do you reckon my chances are of getting Camelot to check the randomness of their random number generator??
p.
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Comments
I'm sure someone once told me that the generator is only semi-random, based on numbers that have already been picked for that draw. I can't remember which way it works, though (i.e. more picks = better chance or more picks = less chance).
I just remembered to go and buy some more lottery tickets but the flipping website is being upgraded, grr.
Randomness doesn't mean because a number has been used recently it shouldn't be used again. If I have the numbers 1 to 49 in a bag and I pick out six at random, I'm as likely to get 1,2,3,4,5,6 as any other sequence. As a sequence, it is just as 'random' as 9,23,1,34,35,12. If I repeat the experiment, there is exactly the same chance that I'll get 1,2,3,4,5,6 again as any other sequence.
If I do pick 1,2,3,4,5,6, then decide to pick another number, the likelyhood of me picking 7 is exactly the same as picking any other number.
Dont' mistake 'randomness' for even distribution. The sort of duplication that you got on your tickets is perfectly normal in a random sequence of numbers. In fact, if such clustering never occured then that would be a strong indicator that the sequence was not truely random.
1,2,3,4,5, 6, 3
I'm glad you bought this up because if you've bought two tickets from different shops (at different times) and they're producing similar numbers and this "always happens" then number selection is not as random as some people believe.
And is it the lottery terminal that generates the lucky dip numbers or is it Camelot's super computer at their HQ ?
(this is because to avoid duplications, you have to select one of the 43 that haven't been chosen in your first ticket out of the 49 numbers you can pick in the second lucky dip, then you have to select one of the 42 numbers not yet chosen out of the 48 remaining... and so on for six numbers).
In other words, the chances that you will get at least one duplication between two lucky dips is 1 - 0.436 = 0.564.
So you're more likely to get one or more duplications than you are to get no duplications, just from buying two lucky dips.
If you bought four tickets, the chances of getting all 24 numbers different is...
(43/49)*(42/48)*...*(38/44) * (37/49)*(36/48)*...*(32/44) * (31/49)*(30/48)*...*(26/44)
= (43!/25!) / (49^3 x 48^3 x... x 44^3)
= 0.003816
So is just about 0.4% chance.
Hence you're 99.6% likely to get at least one duplication between the four lines of numbers.
1 12 13 14 17 19
What a waste of a quid!
Bwahaha!!
Check previous lotto draws and you'll see that the chances of three consecutive numbers being drawn is extremely remote, let alone five or more numbers < 20.
Stick to manually selecting numbers :cool:
Are you assuming each lottery machine and ball set is 100% perfect?
As prooved by the fact I am not on a yaught in the Bahamas right now but about 15 miles outside of Luton
Well that's the stupidity tax for you... taking £1 off the stupid twice a week.
Ahh but an'ordinary' member of the public always wins. :rolleyes:
And think about all that money going to worthwhile charities :rolleyes:
I don't know why you're moaning. It's all about permutations. I know a guy at work who gets 10 lines twice a week. He only changes one number from each line so if three of his numbers come out, he gets £10 and those three numbers can be on 5 or 6 of those lines so he can get £60 for three numbers. He does win quite often with this method.