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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.'"
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.
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.
He comments on the issue in TFA:
"I remember thinking, I'm gonna be rich! I'm gonna plunder the lottery!" he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. "Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited," Srivastava says. "I'd have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That's not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets."
Seems like a decent, down-to-earth guy; he's pretty well off already (six figure salary, if he's making more than $600/day), so I'm sure it's a prospect that was easier for him to forego than most, but it looks like he's got a good balance between the comfort of money and enjoyment of his work.
Jesus, what a choice to have to make: consulting or scratch lottery tickets.
Better to throw oneself off a cliff.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The best advice for someone who wants to "make millions" came from the Buddha.
If you meet the millionaire on the road, kill him?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2006/11/21/lottery-probe.html
Toronto statistician Mohan Srivastava also discovered a way the tickets could be decoded to predict a winner on the game "Tic Tac Toe" nearly three years ago. Srivastava would look at the numbers on the ticket, and if a sequence of numbers was lined up in tic-tac-toe fashion and were not repeated anywhere else on the ticket, it was likely a winner. "If someone explained the trick to you, I think, I actually know, a child could do it," Srivastava said. He contacted the OLG about the trend, and while the corporation recalled unsold tickets of the game, it never went public with the information.