Winner of lottery 4x times outed as Stanford U statistics PhD

[zengrifter]

Here -

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code - WIRED Feb 2011

That night, however, he realized that the voice was right: The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he 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 knew the secret code.

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards.

In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

Full story = http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

[aslan]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

Here -

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code - WIRED Feb 2011

That night, however, he realized that the voice was right: The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he 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 knew the secret code.

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards.

In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

Full story = http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

Can we agree that we can't trust them guvmint guys to git anything straight?

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by aslan

Can we agree that we can't trust them guvmint guys to git anything straight?

Maybe this will help --

Bill Clinton Calls For Internet ‘Ministry of Truth’

[aslan]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

Maybe this will help --

Bill Clinton Calls For Internet ‘Ministry of Truth’

Dang, the Zen Zone under attack! Maybe they need to develop an alternative Internet for conspiracy theories, similar to the exile of the Zen Zone to an alternative website. Is it too late for Ken to call Washington? He may become the new Internet Czar!

[Marlin]

Originally Posted by tthree

Is the Texas scratch off a beatable format like the lottery in Conn. and Michigan?

Add the Canadian Lottery to that list.

Marlin