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South Africa Powerball Scam

2 points by BatteryMountain ↗ HN
Last night the Powerball Lottery of South Africa got some unusual results.

You have to pick 5 balls from a pool that ranges from 1 to 50.

You have to pick 1 ball from a pool that ranges from 1 to 20.

Last night the winning numbers were: [5][6][7][8][9]+[10]

There are 20 people who won this combination.

Sub categories:

5 correct: 79 winners.

4 + 1 correct: 109 winners.

4 correct: 1944 winners.

...

According to the Lottery company, your chance of winning the jackpot is 1/42000000.

To get last night's jackpot, your selection has to be near the very end of the left side of the bell curve.

They use a computer program to generate the numbers. How probable is it that their programming language picked those numbers? What are the chances they were hacked? What are the chances an old (or current) employee or contractor didn't bake in some numbers + dates with known data?

What's the chance that 20 people picked numbers that close to the edge of the bell curve? What's the chance that the next 79 people picked 5 balls that close to the edge?

Any thoughts on these results?

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] thread
detaro
What "bell curve"?

And it's totally normal that people pick number sequences etc on lottery tickets, so if one of those (or ones resembling dates etc) comes up its normal theres more winners than usual.

BatteryMountain
For placement of the bell curve on lottery balls sets, just sum the set to get it's total.

Sum the lowest possible set and the largest possible set to establish your boundries.

For this lottery it is:

Lower boundry: [1][2][3][4][5][1] = 16

Upper boundry: [50][49][48][47][46][20] = 218

Mid Point: 101

Last nights draw is 45

The sum of any set will fall somewhere between these two boundries (16 and 218), with majority landing close or to the sides of the mid point.

jfengel
What's the average number of winners for a South Africa powerball?
rwdim
The real question should be: is there a clustering of purchases of those numbers for this draw that is different than the same numbers on other draws? If this was a planned scam, the distribution of purchases would be more tightly coupled than normal.