" I found his use of a computer program programmed to gradually shuffle a set of letters till they spelled out a particular phrase"
Do the odds of winning a state or multistate lottery sound easy to you?? eg 1 in 175,000,000
"In a typical 6 from 49 lotto, 6 numbers are drawn from 49 and if the 6 numbers on a ticket match the numbers drawn, the ticket holder is a jackpot winner - this is true regardless of the order in which the numbers are drawn. The odds of being a jackpot winner are approximately 1 in 14 million (13,983,816 to be exact). The derivation of this result (and other winning scores) is shown in the Lottery mathematics article. To put these odds in context, suppose one buys one lottery ticket per week. 13,983,816 weeks is roughly 269,000 years; In the quarter-million years of play, one would expect to win the jackpot only once.
The odds of winning any actual lottery can vary widely depending on the lottery design of financial engineers[clarification needed]. Mega Millions is a very popular multi-state lottery in the United States which is known for jackpots that grow very large from time to time. This attractive feature is made possible simply by designing the game to be extremely difficult to win: 1 chance in 175,711,536. That's over twelve times higher than the example above. Mega Millions players also pick six numbers, but two different "bags" are used. The first five numbers come from one bag that contains numbers from 1 to 56. The sixth number -- the "Mega Ball number" -- comes from the second bag, which contains numbers from 1 to 46. To win a Mega Millions jackpot, a player's five regular numbers must match the five regular numbers drawn and the Mega Ball number must match the Mega Ball number drawn. In other words, it is not good enough to pick 10, 18, 25, 33, 42 / 7 when the drawing is 7, 10, 25, 33, 42 / 18. Even though the player picked all the right numbers, the Mega Ball number at the end of the ticket doesn't match the one drawn, so the ticket would be credited with matching only four numbers (10, 25, 33, 42).
The SuperEnalotto of Italy is supposedly the most difficult, as players try to match 6 numbers out of 90. The odds in making the jackpot: 1 in 622,614,630." |
