I was thinking do all the results have the same odds in say a standard 8 ball lottery, it feels like to me you’re less likely to get a sequential set (eg. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, not necessarily drawn in that order) than get a heap of balls at random, it just makes me wonder if the odds are the same or if I’m over thinking.
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Take this classic for example :
You flip a coin (heads /tails) and you bet with your friend that each time it is heads you get paid 1 dollar and if it is tails you pay him one dollar.
It goes extremely bad and you flip 50 times tails (i know, much wow).
Fed up with your losses you say to him : “double down : 100 dollars for me if next one is heads, tails means I pay you 100 dollars”. To your delight he accepts. What a dummy, since it has been tails 50 times in a row, what are the odds it is tails again, right? RIGHT?
Guess what :
1) all though unlikely it is entirely possible for the first 50 times to have flipped heads AND
2) guess what? The 51th flip ended up tails again.
That’s because the odds of each consequential flip is exactly the same : 50 percent. Believe it or not.
The coin does not have a “memory” : it does not take the previous results into account when flipping.
The same with your example, it is not because the first number is 1 that the lottery machine will say : “wait, drawing a 2 would be silly, let’s not do that”
This is called the Gamblers Fallacy.
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