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
The two draws are entirely unconnected.
Humans are very, very bad at understanding unlikely events. And a particular sequence of numbers is unlikely. So let’s not do big numbers.
You have a black sack. It contains a red and a blue ball. Reach in and pull one out. What’s the chance of blue? 50/50 right?
Put it back. Leave it until tomorrow. Now pick out a ball. What’s the chance of blue now? Still 50/50 isn’t it? How could it be anything else? It can’t!
If the number 25 is drawn today, the only way it could be less likely to come up next time is if that information “I was drawn last week” was somehow passed on to the next draw. There is no way to do that. The ball has no idea it came out a week ago.
The lottery also plays on our feeling that numbers are somehow special and mathematical. But the numbers on the balls have no meaning. You could use symbols. Boat, horse, house, dog, tomato, scissors and car come out. Without numbers we don’t do things like “ooh, they drew 13 and I had 14! So close” when, of course, it isn’t close at all.
It’s also clear that if boat comes out every week well, that’s ok, it’s just a symbol.
The reason no particular lottery has ever done the same numbers twice is the same reason they’ve never drawn *your* numbers. Any particular set of numbers is tens of millions to one. It’s just that each week the numbers you’re talking about aren’t ones in a ticket, they’re the ones printed in the paper last week.
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