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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!
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.
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.
RTFA
"Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests," he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. "Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious," he says. "Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers.
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
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.
So:
Step 1) Be a retailer, or get a job for a retailer, selling lottery tickets. This would get past your "there is no real way to get only the winners"
Step 2) Take all the scratched tickets that people throw away onsite, and scan them for hints as to how to pick winners.
Step 3) Buy a bunch of probable winners to see how accurate you are, and if you are accurate, profit.
Now a few things come to mind.
Many people like to buy the "new" tickets as they seem to "win" more often. This would be normal if took a few weeks for retailers to get a handle on how to pick the winners. You win more often when "chance" is in play, and less often when the probably winners have been weeded out.
It would also explain how retailers cash a high percentage of winners, in Canada at least, were this has been in the news for the past few years.
Here is one such article, and note, this has led to changes in Canada. Seemingly not good enough.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=4be28910-9cec-4785-b471-f37849a29008&k=17633
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
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.
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.