LeeMobile

So my parents play the lotto. In Canada it’s called the 6/49, because you choose 6 numbers out of a possible 49. Recently my mum won a whole $10 and reinvested that money into more lottery tickets.

She’s won again and has asked me to head over to the corner store to grab another set of tickets. Now, in the irrational depths of my mind I want to believe that if I goto the lotto store at the right moment, the right numbers will match up coincidentally with the winning numbers.

Think about it. The computers that print out the random “quick pick” numbers on a lotto ticket base their numbers off of a pseudo-random generation algorithm, and the seed of that algorithm is most likely time based. In layman’s terms, the time that you buy your lotto ticket will affect the outcome of the numbers being printed.

For the sake of fun, let’s say that before each lotto ticket is spat out of the machine, it grabs the current millisecond before printing out the ticket. And let’s assume that there are just as many seeds (possible random number combinations) as there are possible numbers for the 6/49, roughly 14 million. If you count that all up, your corner store hits that winning lotto ticket number roughly every 4 hours.

Buying that lotto ticket at exactly the right millisecond within that 4 hour cycle will yield you the winning lotto ticket.

Sometime between now, the moment you read this, and the next 4 hours… your nearest corner store has the potential to print out the exact numbers for the next winning lotto ticket.

However, considering the odds that you have are 1 in 14 million per entry… it’s probably not very likely that you’ll win.

But who knows. Maybe that jerk who cut in front of you on your way to work today delayed just enough time, in the order of milliseconds, so that all the events leading up to you buying that lotto ticket line up to be the correct winning ticket for the next draw.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m trying to decide when would be the perfect time to head over and buy more tickets for the next draw. I realize that the lotto is a fool’s wager, but doing foolish things is fun sometimes

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.