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
No one has addressed yet the point your coworker seems to be using to justify their (incorrect) belief: that there has never been a repeat on numbers that wins.
Your coworker is probably right about that. But your coworker is also ignoring that there are comparatively very few drawings compared to possible outcomes.
Consider if there were three balls, each 1-10. Week 1 is 1, 5, 8. Week two is 2, 7, 8. Week three is 1, 4, 5. And that’s all the drawings we’ve done. Now, it’s true we’ve never had back-to-back identical, but we’ve also not had nearly 1000 possible two-week-combinations. But not having any history of going 1,5,8 to 2,3,4 is not something the human brain sees as a pattern, even though it’s exactly as much of a pattern as not ever having 1,5,8 feed into 1,5,8.
Basically your coworker has seen one true pattern but missed the millions of other patterns. So they’re fixating on something that isn’t actually worth fixating on.
Latest Answers