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Statistician Cracks Code For Lottery Tickets
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, an MIT educated statistician who became intrigued by a particular type of scratch-off lottery ticket called an extended-play game — sometimes referred to as a baited hook — that has a tic-tac-toe grid of visible numbers that looks like a miniature spreadsheet. Srivastava discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off — the ticket could be cracked if you figured out the secret code. Srivastava's fundamental insight was that the apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie because the software that generates the tickets has to precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. 'It wasn't that hard,' says Srivastava. 'I do the same kind of math all day long.'"
"Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, a *millionaire* MIT educated statistician" Fixed that for you
This just in, MIT-educated statistician Mohan Srivastava has retired suddenly at a young age and is not taking questions.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Now that's *sunglasses* the ticket.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
When was the last time you were allowed to look through and then pick the scratch off tickets you wanted from a spindle of tickets behind the counter.
While the game is flawed, there is no real way to get only the winners.
This was in Wired Magazine earlier last month.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1
The same article appeared in Feb 2011 issue of Wired even though Lottery Post doesn't seem to go out of its way to attribute the author and cite the issue properly.
lawsuit coming in, 5, 4, 3 ....
After calculating that his average winnings would come out to $600 a day:
"People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn't take advantage of the lottery," he says. "I can assure you that that's not the case. I'd simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn't worth my time."
Moral of the story for those who play the lotto: Even if you figure out how to break the game, it still isn't worth playing.
A week is not old for slashdot, I can see you are new here so we can let it slide this once. In the future you should probably also not read the articles.
The problem is that he reverse engineered their deterministic process for generating winners and losers and then was able to pick out the winning cards based on the partial information they revealed. The order in which they are printed doesn't really matter. Given any random subset of the cards he could pick the winners out of them at a much higher % than he should have been able to if they were actually random.
... :(
Sounds to me like they should figure the game out in such a way that a real random number generator will generate winners and losers at the desired rates on average and then just rely on the law of averages / large numbers to give them their desired take.
Forgot to login, sorry for the dup
TFA says otherwise.
Because I am calling you from my boat, BITCH!
I read the Wired article; the amazing thing is he did this with sample size of two.
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
If you'd read the fine article, you'd have seen that he calculated how much he'd earn by using his system and how long it would take - and found that it was far lower than his consulting pay rate. So if he spent time doing it rather than his day job he'd be taking a pay cut.
Sounds to me like a GOOD mathematician - one who applies math to ALL the aspects of the problem and comes to the right conclusion.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax.
And yet a Massachusetts auditor for the lottery says of people gaming the lottery system:
The problem is that when there's a lot of money involved, unscrupulous people are always going to be looking for new ways to game the system, or worse.
Exactly. So why don't I feel sorry for them?
In Massachusetts, and I presume other states, there's a limit on scanning the barcodes on scratch tickets. In Mass, the limit is three scans per day if the tickets are not winners. After three losing scans, the lottery machine shuts down for a period or until the merchant calls lottery HQ for a reactivation code. The merchant may also get a call from the security dept at lottery HQ to 'splain why the machine shut down.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Correction: YOU and some others don't read the article. And you lower the quality of the site enormously by commenting without doing so. Plenty of other people do read the article first, especially the ones who get modded up.
Don't judge others by your own low standards.
After playing quite a few of these games, I have seen this pattern too. I can look at a ticket (I'm a fan of the crossword game), and look for the less-common letters, and know basically whether or not I stand a good chance of winning. The problem here though - let's say I buy 5 tickets and don't scratch them because they all appear to be losers. What gas station have you been to that will take them back, or exchange for other tickets? None. You're buying the next 5 tickets off the roll. So what if you know that 1 out of the 5 has a really good shot at winning - you already paid for the other 4 and lost.
The real humor from TFA comes from reading the comments that follow it. A quick read through tells you that the lottery commission has nothing to fear.
If I were him, I might have gone down to the local soup kitchen and told a couple homeless people about it, and given them each a few tickets to demonstrate it. That community could have benefited for a few weeks or months before the lotto figured it out.
Yet again, Slashdot links to some parastic site that copied the original story rather than the source: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1.
He's a consultant. The first thing I though reading this article was that he's fishing for customers. Why break the lotto for $600 a day when you can get yourself hired by the lotto companies to check their work by showing them how weak their current auditors are?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Back in (Greek) Junior High we went for a one-day school trip to an island (Poros IIRC). The day plan consistend of letting a few dozens of 14-15 year-olds roam around the town unattended. Obviously, one of my group's first stops was at an Arcade, to spend some coins on things like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or NBA Jam. Another group of friends called us to a back room to check something out. There was an electronic (electromechanic?) gambling machine that had a roullette (but with fewer segments than the classic) and you could bet on outcomes. I hadn't seen such a machine since my usual Arcades in the city were just, well, Arcades, so I was intrigued and stood by to watch some of my friends play. Born a geek, even before any formal statistics training, I started analyzing the game and the betting possibilities and I soon realized that - woops - the designers allowed for multiple bets per cycle, but had not calculated the combined odds properly, so there was a combination of bets that would give the player an advantage. So I told my friends to stop betting randomly and I showed them a winning strategy that would give them on average something like a quarter (the equivalent 20 or 50 drachma coin that arcades accepted back then) for every 4 or so (don't remember specifics) plays. After explaining, I oversaw a few rounds and then left. Yes, money was useful for me as well, but I had calculated the expected payout and judged that I had stayed enough at the arcade, so spending the rest of the day outside (and finding a good restaurant) was worth more for me than that amount.
Sure enough, after several hours, we all met back at the boat. The 3-4 kids that had stayed at the arcade had each made around 2-3k drachma (I guess something like $20 of early 90's USD), which was not insubstantial for us back then (since I remember I felt about 20% regret for not staying myself, given the fact that I had not found such a great restaurant - hehe).
Anyway, the moral of the story is that gambling games are not usually designed by PhD's, although I would have expected at least big lotteries like those in TFA to be designed by groups of excellent statisticians. And also that winning a gambling game is not always worth your time.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS