[Hotelier]

This certainly puts the lottery odds into perspective.
It's a lottery simulator..you type in your numbers and it simulates the lottery draw(2 tickets a week) and compares them and lets you know how many weeks it took.
After 150 years the biggest prize I'd won was £100, I'd spent £15,000 and lost £11,000.
(The average time for the jackpot is about 130,000 years btw )

http://justwebware.com/uklotto/uklotto.html

[Uk Ltd]

Nice setup, would be better if someone had entered the actual lotto results in the uk since its inception, as after 40 years, it's got me as never having won 4 balls, except when I used to play the lottery, I'd say it happened once a year!!

[Si_Crewe]

Dinky little program.

I can't help noticing that it seems like the longer you let it run, the smaller the return on your investment gets.
I'm actually not sure why that is.
Surely the incidence of winning should be constant so the return should stay roughly the same?

[njp]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

I can't help noticing that it seems like the longer you let it run, the smaller the return on your investment gets.
I'm actually not sure why that is.
Surely the incidence of winning should be constant so the return should stay roughly the same?

It's simply playing the odds. If there was only one prize of £10, then as the number of runs increased, you would expect your returns to get ever closer to the theoretical return of £0.17 per £1 spent. But of course other prizes are available. I ran the simulation and got the following results:

No of years Return

1 - 0.10
5 - 0.13
10 - 0.36
20 - 0.15
30 - 0.23
40 - 0.32
50- 0.24

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by njp

It's simply playing the odds. If there was only one prize of £10, then as the number of runs increased, you would expect your returns to get ever closer to the theoretical return of £0.17 per £1 spent. But of course other prizes are available. I ran the simulation and got the following results:

No of years Return

1 - 0.10
5 - 0.13
10 - 0.36
20 - 0.15
30 - 0.23
40 - 0.32
50- 0.24

Uhuh.

I suppose it could just be "luck" but the way the returns seemed to dwindle (for me) made me wonder if the random number generator they're using isn't entirely random.

[njp]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

I suppose it could just be "luck" but the way the returns seemed to dwindle (for me) made me wonder if the random number generator they're using isn't entirely random.

Well, it isn't. But it is entirely pseudo-random...