So a co-worker was talking about someone’s stupid plan to always play the previous winning lotto numbers. I chimed in that I was pretty sure that didn’t actually hurt their odds. They thought I was crazy, pointing out that probably no lottery ever rolled the same five-six winning numbers twice in a row.
I seem to remember that I am correct, any sequence of numbers has the same odds. But I was totally unable to articulate how that could be. Can someone help me out? It does really seem like the person using this method would be at a serious disadvantage.
Edit: I get it, and I’m not gonna think about balls anymore today.
In: Mathematics
It’s technically not, it’s just that we have a poor sense of what IS likely.
It’s the same random choice between the same huge set of random numbers. *Generally*, repeating the same number this way is unlikely, but it is not made cosmically less likely EACH time.
For example, flipping a single coin has an exactly 50% chance of landing on heads. Every time I flip it, it still has a 50% chance of landing on heads. Nothing about the coin itself changes between flipping, so it’s no less likely *each separate time* to land on heads.
But it’s only 50% when YOU the human observer are predicting it as single time. When YOU attempt to predict MANY flips, you are adding to the likelihood that YOU will guess it wrong. Because it truly is random EACH time.
There is nothing “special” about a number that wins. But we assign significance to things all the time. It’s just how our brains work.
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