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Ask HN: Are lottery random-picked numbers truly random?

11 points by smaili ↗ HN
With all of the latest national buzz on the lottery, a thought crossed my mind: how are random numbers generated by lottery registers? Are they done locally on the machine itself, or do they make a request to some external service? Does each store get assigned a subset of number ranges (think subnet masks with IP addresses) to choose from, or is every machine regardless of store/location free to select from all possible numbers?

14 comments

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frnkshin
I think the poster is talking about the Quick Pick rather than how the winning numbers are generated.
jepler
whoops, I lose at reading comprehension today.
joezydeco
Given that the terminal machine can also accept a scanned ticket from a customer, it would seem to make sense that the terminal generates the Quick Pick set and transmits it to the backend just as if you had bubbled the paper yourself.
Nomentatus
I was thinking this the other day - the best way to finagle the lottery now as a programmer is not to fiddle with the numbers chosen, but with the random number generator at the ticket machine (since so many people use it), so that some numbers or patterns are rare; then buy those and wait 'till they hit. I'll bet it's being done.
samfisher83
Someone did this he got up to 25 years in jail:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-lottery-ri...

Nomentatus
Thanks for the link - still, this is fiddling with the RNG picking the winner NOT the quickpik RNG choices at the till as I had envisioned. Plus it's not doing that in the way I'm thinking about either (even if you decided to alter the winner-picker algorithm, which isn't necessary on my scheme.)

"predictable numbers only on certain days" is not subtle. (I had known of this or a similar case when I wrote.) What I'm thinking of is much less traceable - just an RNG function that happens to leave say, 10% of the numbers as quite rare. There are easy ways to do this that can plausibly explained as mere programming errors. (Meaning you won't be convicted, since there's no code that's definitely tampered with, that couldn't possibly be there unless someone had the intention of cheating. Just a logic error.) You or your confederates buy tickets with those rare numbers, with a very positive ROI, until you're rich. Takes a while.

Putting this on the QuickPic machine at the till means most customers will be competing for common numbers, so you can scoop up the rare ones.

otras
I highly recommend this relatively recent article from the New York Times: The Man Who Cracked the Lottery. From the relevant Wikipedia page[1]:

In 2017, Eddie Raymond Tipton, former information security director of the American Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), confessed to rigging a random number generator that he and two others used in multiple cases of fraud against state lotteries. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/03/magazine/mone...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Lotto_fraud_scandal

ArtWomb
I suppose one could buy a 100 tickets and perform a chi-squared test ;)

Even a cursory glance of Powerball frequency charts shows no discernible pattern.

Looking at the last winning numbers, they certainly seem clustered at the high end. Still uniform random for a given sample. But certainly not evenly distributed.

Question you really want to be asking is: does my likelihood increase if I select the most frequently picked numbers? Advantage is probably minuscule.

Although, I believe there is a strategy in table roulette that exploits "runs" in which the same number is drawn consecutively. Which for small sample sizes has a much higher probability of occurring than a long non-repetitive sub-sequence.

It would be the scandal of the century if the entire lottery were faked. Centralized database of numbers played. And then a drawing that results in a "lottery actor" winning for show.

Of course the true scandal is that the real winner of every jackpot is the IRS!

Jeremy1026
I think OPs question was more on the "Quick Pick" number selection for purchased tickets, not for the numbers drawn. Which are done via mechanical random generation (balls being blown in a case and released one by one).
segmondy
I personally think the winning machine has a decent random generator but the machines are crap. I wonder if one can use the FOIA to request the algorithms running on both machines to see if they are the same. They ought to be.
sinus17
Above the way random numbers are generated now think the best mathematicians of the world.