Hi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual and then realized it was from HN, very cool!
Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for many of us.
The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).
I would very much like to see an even faster "turbo" option because even though the current max speed of 1,000 tickets a second really drives home the point of how long it would take to actually win, I still want to see the simulation hit the jackpot a few times.
Reading people’s replies it seems like many are misunderstanding the expected value of a ticket. You may want to add another column to the table of odds showing what percentage a ticket’s hypothetical payout is from each prize, or just what the average loss per ticket is.
Also, at one point I messed up which pattern on Mega Millions tickets were winners. Something about that big X in a separate column just subconsciously seemed like it was showing winners. Perhaps dashes vs checks or groupings winning and non winning tickets together.
I noticed that when you select pick random numbers, it only picks it once. Can we run the simulation where it picks new numbers every time? I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds.
>I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds.
It won't make an impact on the odds of your tickets coming up as winners, unless they have a bug in their simulation. In the real world the probability of single versus multiple jackpot winners might vary with number choices, but they've already said they're assuming a single jackpot winner.
Really good tool, I made a very basic text one and showed a few friends and it put them off the lottery.
One suggestion I would make is allowing the random numbers selected by the user to be random for each draw. I understand in the scheme of things that it doesn't make difference to your odds but that's a strategy that some people play.
It would also be cool to track how many other people chose the same numbers that you did and then divide the jackpot winnings by that amount of people.
Another thing (I'm really just giving you a todo list of things that I had) was to organise the number selectors to mirror the pattern on the lottery tickets. People have very different approaches, picking columns, going over 31, sequences and you could track the user behaviour behind number selection.
Select random numbers greater than 31, and run them against past winning numbers, using the actual prize pool payouts (histories available for all major lotteries). Repeat millions of times. You'll be amazed how much more money you win. ;-P (And how much money you still lose even with this impressive advantage).Unfortunately, there aren't enough historical draws to determine whether there are more fine-grained statistically-significant differences. My tests were actually run on first-half vs. last half. But > 31 seems like a defensible rule as well.
I expected the "Winnings:" mouse-over on the frequency chart to tell me the total amount won on that $ category (count*single winning). On MS Edge it just shows "Count: 4033\nWinnings: $2"
Custom option needs more options: some big lotteries use two extra numbers (e.g. Euromillions). Other lotteries just pick up a single number from 00000 to 99999 (or even lower).
I never use Lotteries, but I was curious and wanted to test a domestic one, however the bonus number can be from 1 to 5, but I cant put it lower than 10 on your page :'(
It might just be me, but it took me awhile to even realize there were interactive components on the page. Something about it made it seem like they were screenshots.
I used to work at a lotto counter in my towns supermarket. When I started I noticed alot of older regular buyers, a weekly lotto purchase like the daily newspaper. However, as the younger generation started bringing in kids I didn't see this habit, instead just an occasional purchase for a birthday gift or rolling the dice because the jackpots gotten big enough (funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest).
Overall I would consider lotto small next to the scratch cards (our countries version at least). I have never seen a more predatory marketing strategy, and completely swept under the rug next to lotto being berated with anti-gambling campaigning. To be fair, lotto is bad, but scratch cards are much, much worse.
A memory that stuck for me was a customer blowing well over $100 bucks on scratchcards over 20 minutes, just pulling over and over, then getting card declined at the grocery checkouts.
> funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest
Not really?
The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the jackpot is $100M.
There’s a balance between jackpot size and a given drawing’s popularity for sure.
There are also bad number choices and good number choices. 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12, will put you in a collision space with other players who like to choose birthdays.
Just use the random pick and don’t think about it. If you do win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
> 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
Uh... so at first I saw your point, but if your odds of winning never actually change, how is not winning better than splitting a jackpot?
I guess if you only play one drawing, you’re right. Winning is always better than losing.
But if you play the lottery week after week, year after year—and you always play the same numbers—then you’re ensuring a mediocre prize should you actually get the jackpot.
Playing the lottery is not a mathematically sound decision in any case, but there’s no reason to make it even worse by chopping your potential jackpot winnings down by over 99%
The odds of winning don't change, the odds of splitting the pot change. Certain numbers are picked more than others so to have the best odds of not splitting the pot, random numbers are best.
Numbers greater that 31 are better. Almost 30% better! Because you are less likely to split a pot when you win. But not good enough to make playing a lottery ticket a winning propostition.
Maybe, "the time when expected value is the lowest"?
The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get less cash out of a high-demand drawing.
And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.
What do you mean by intermediate levels? In the 2 main US lotteries the only award that gets split is the single jackpot. Even the 2nd place award is $1 million and is not divided among multiple winners.
Can someone explain to me how the EV can be so incredibly low? I know the answer is because people will buy the tickets no matter what, but even compared to other losing games the lottery comes away looking like an absolute bandit.
A run on the simulation (n=1000000) comes back with -92% EV. It looks like -10% [1] is a rough estimate for slot machine EV, which I would ballpark into the same game genre (-EV, no skill entertainment) as the lottery.
What accounts for this payout discrepancy in what I would consider similar games? On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before?
In short, the simulator doesn’t buy enough ticket-draws to approach the Law of Large Numbers.
But that’s also a feature of the lottery — most people overestimate their ability to win or underestimate how many lifetimes of consistent play is required to statistically win a jackpot.
I don't think people actually make that mistake. They know the chance of winning is tiny. The point is more that a non-zero chance of life changing money (plus the entertainment of fantasising about a win) is worth more to them than the cost of the ticket.
Exactly, winning the lottery is massively life changing. This is actually something I think people don't understand about the psychology of lottery. In some regards it doesn't matter if the money is $50M or $500M for most players even though that has a huge impact on the EV.
this was my approach when i lived in oregon. i played the state lottery which was something like 20x better odds, granted the jackpot was usually like $6 million after cash out, but that was still totally good in my book. it cost a buck and i got to have fun with the idea of it for a few days.
one time i get like 20 weeks in a row up front (a post-dated ticket) and i won $56 dollars or something one week. i did the odds of that happened and it was something that would happen like once every 30 years if i played weekly. i stopped after that, haha.
Mega lotteries draw once every 2-8 days. Slot machines / video poker / etc are happy to draw as fast as you can push the button. They are designed to take your money, but their rewards systems are completely different.
Also, the mega lotteries benefit from viral marketing, “earned media”, and water cooler talk. Slot machines are just a way for bored people to pass the time, much like video games or doomscrolling.
On the other hand, if I don't buy a lottery ticket, I have no chance to waste my money on the lottery, but if I do buy a ticket, the odds of wasting money are infinitely higher.
Estimated monetary value might be a wiser metric to use :)
Going by the calculator, EMV of going from buying 0 tickets to 1 is -$1.85 for Mega Millions, same as going from n to n+1; n >= 0. The first ticket is the first one you lose with, statistically.
That's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize. Whereas if I play at all, at least there's a chance, however remote, of a quite life-changing positive event happening. So, therefore, it makes sense to put a very small amount of totally throw-away income into big-prize lotto tickets, just so you're in the game at all.
Based on this kind of thinking, my personal rules are: never spend more than 0.1% of take-home pay per time-period buying tickets, and only buy big-prize lotto tickets that have potentially-life-changing payouts.
There's a near-zero possibility that the next potato chip in the bag has been laced with cyanide. But if you never eat any potato chips, there's a definite 0% chance that you'll die of cyanide-laced potato chips.
This kind of thinking never holds up when it's a small chance of a horrible outcome.
> However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize.
I'm not sure about that. There is some chance of someone random buying a ticket and gifting it to you and then that ticket winning. Not a big chance. But it is not 0.
Your chances were 0, you buy a ticket, and now your chances are x. Where x is not infinitely greater than 0, it's x greater than 0. Pretty sure your proposition implies that 2 tickets provide the same odds as one ticket (2 infinity vs 1 infinity).
I haven't gotten into the discrete math in many years. If you're right do you mind explaining please? I can intuit what you're getting at. 0 odds * inf < (odds with one ticket). Is that a decent description?
This is nonsense if it's meant to be interpreted as anything but a joke, or as a way to maximize your own personal fun.
If you send me $20k of bitcoin and a UUID, I will run 'crypto.randomUUID()', and if I get the same UUID as you I'll send back $40k.
If you don't send me any money, you have 0% chance of winning, but if you do send me $20k, you have a mere 1 in 2^122 chance of winning, an infinite increase in your chance of winning, so surely it is rational to do so.
If you truly believe what you just wrote, I'll await my $20k.
To believe that you take a chance and you suddenly get the prize, despite statistics, is to believe that you're special. Maybe some people try such things to return the warm feeling of the early pre-school years.
I won! That's it, the lottery is worth playing if only I can repeat this performance IRL.
I won the $340,000,000 Powerball Grand Prize after buying 11,651,310 $2 tickets leaving me with a grand total of
$319,781,766 in earnings ($27.45 per ticket).
There's a movie out starring Walter White, of the Selbees side, called Jerry and Marge Go Large, but which talks about the story, but portrays the MIT kids poorly for dramatic effect.
I got lucky. Won a million bucks early in the simulation and it took a while before the EV was negative again. Should have stopped right after winning a million, duh.
Not sure if anyone linked it here, but my favorite simulator was a 2D grid, with about 50 or so units per side. The computer picks 3 squares, you pick 3 squares. The XxY unit grid was set up such that if you picked the same 3 squares as the computer, it was the same odds as winning Powerball. Seeing how hard it was to even get 1 square really drove home the odds. I also did a similar calculation by estimating the area of millions of quarters (enough to represent the 1/N chance to win) and thought "ok, if I launched a rubber ball randomly at high velocity in this huge room, I would win if it landed on one exact quarter that I picked in advance. When I saw it like that, I realized there's no way.
It would've been nice to not assume only one lottery winner. People tend to pick numbers that are meaningful for them: birthdays, favorite numbers, lucky numbers. Thus it actually significantly increases your EV if you pick unusual numbers, which is not reflected here.
Does this have any way of simulating multiple plays per draw? I'm curious what happens to EV when you buy X tickets per draw instead of just 1. And for both circumstances: (a) ensure all X tickets are unique and (b) random entries with replacement.
The tool has a maximum speed of 1000 tickets per second, which may not be fast enough for some users. Hopefully the author will consider adding a 'turbo' option to make the simulation faster so we can get more results in less time.
What would be super interesting is to collect all different lotteries from different countries and regions, and run simulations to find which ones are most lucrative. And you can’t treat know how good is your local lottery in comparison.
There was a Romanian economist who was able to exploit several lotteries around the world. He essentially bought every combination to lotteries where the payout was higher than the cost. Logistical nightmare.
I'm the smarmy prick who, when somebody says they bought a lottery ticket, I say "Give me the same amount you paid for that lottery ticket, and if you win I'll double your winnings."
Them: "there's no way you could afford to pay me!"
Now I just need to scrape the data on all major lotteries worldwide, plop them all into the simulator, make some assumptions about exchange rates and figure out where in the world I should bet on the lottery to get the best payout!
Hi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual and then realized it was from HN, very cool!
Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for many of us.
The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).
I would very much like to see an even faster "turbo" option because even though the current max speed of 1,000 tickets a second really drives home the point of how long it would take to actually win, I still want to see the simulation hit the jackpot a few times.
Reading people’s replies it seems like many are misunderstanding the expected value of a ticket. You may want to add another column to the table of odds showing what percentage a ticket’s hypothetical payout is from each prize, or just what the average loss per ticket is.
Also, at one point I messed up which pattern on Mega Millions tickets were winners. Something about that big X in a separate column just subconsciously seemed like it was showing winners. Perhaps dashes vs checks or groupings winning and non winning tickets together.
I did the same when I tried to create my own lottery. Thought the "correct" icons were the "wrong guess" ones and vice-versa
I noticed that when you select pick random numbers, it only picks it once. Can we run the simulation where it picks new numbers every time? I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds.
>I would love to see if that would make an impact on the odds.
It won't make an impact on the odds of your tickets coming up as winners, unless they have a bug in their simulation. In the real world the probability of single versus multiple jackpot winners might vary with number choices, but they've already said they're assuming a single jackpot winner.
Can you track how many people have hit the jackpot? Or how long folks stuck around to see if they hit the jackpot?
Really good tool, I made a very basic text one and showed a few friends and it put them off the lottery.
One suggestion I would make is allowing the random numbers selected by the user to be random for each draw. I understand in the scheme of things that it doesn't make difference to your odds but that's a strategy that some people play.
It would also be cool to track how many other people chose the same numbers that you did and then divide the jackpot winnings by that amount of people.
Another thing (I'm really just giving you a todo list of things that I had) was to organise the number selectors to mirror the pattern on the lottery tickets. People have very different approaches, picking columns, going over 31, sequences and you could track the user behaviour behind number selection.
Select random numbers greater than 31, and run them against past winning numbers, using the actual prize pool payouts (histories available for all major lotteries). Repeat millions of times. You'll be amazed how much more money you win. ;-P (And how much money you still lose even with this impressive advantage).Unfortunately, there aren't enough historical draws to determine whether there are more fine-grained statistically-significant differences. My tests were actually run on first-half vs. last half. But > 31 seems like a defensible rule as well.
What probability distribution are you using for the random numbers?
I expected the "Winnings:" mouse-over on the frequency chart to tell me the total amount won on that $ category (count*single winning). On MS Edge it just shows "Count: 4033\nWinnings: $2"
Custom option needs more options: some big lotteries use two extra numbers (e.g. Euromillions). Other lotteries just pick up a single number from 00000 to 99999 (or even lower).
I never use Lotteries, but I was curious and wanted to test a domestic one, however the bonus number can be from 1 to 5, but I cant put it lower than 10 on your page :'(
It might just be me, but it took me awhile to even realize there were interactive components on the page. Something about it made it seem like they were screenshots.
The site's newsletter module is broken. Won't accept my email.
wow, it's really good and the rest of your site is even better
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
buy a real lottery ticket
[flagged]
I used to work at a lotto counter in my towns supermarket. When I started I noticed alot of older regular buyers, a weekly lotto purchase like the daily newspaper. However, as the younger generation started bringing in kids I didn't see this habit, instead just an occasional purchase for a birthday gift or rolling the dice because the jackpots gotten big enough (funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest).
Overall I would consider lotto small next to the scratch cards (our countries version at least). I have never seen a more predatory marketing strategy, and completely swept under the rug next to lotto being berated with anti-gambling campaigning. To be fair, lotto is bad, but scratch cards are much, much worse.
A memory that stuck for me was a customer blowing well over $100 bucks on scratchcards over 20 minutes, just pulling over and over, then getting card declined at the grocery checkouts.
> funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest
Not really?
The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the jackpot is $100M.
There’s a balance between jackpot size and a given drawing’s popularity for sure.
There are also bad number choices and good number choices. 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12, will put you in a collision space with other players who like to choose birthdays.
Just use the random pick and don’t think about it. If you do win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
> 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
Uh... so at first I saw your point, but if your odds of winning never actually change, how is not winning better than splitting a jackpot?
I guess if you only play one drawing, you’re right. Winning is always better than losing.
But if you play the lottery week after week, year after year—and you always play the same numbers—then you’re ensuring a mediocre prize should you actually get the jackpot.
Playing the lottery is not a mathematically sound decision in any case, but there’s no reason to make it even worse by chopping your potential jackpot winnings down by over 99%
The odds of winning don't change, the odds of splitting the pot change. Certain numbers are picked more than others so to have the best odds of not splitting the pot, random numbers are best.
Numbers greater that 31 are better. Almost 30% better! Because you are less likely to split a pot when you win. But not good enough to make playing a lottery ticket a winning propostition.
Maybe, "the time when expected value is the lowest"?
The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get less cash out of a high-demand drawing.
And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.
> > funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest
> Not really?
A big jackpot draws more players, and that reduces the payouts at the intermediate levels.
> that reduces the payouts at the intermediate levels
Which has nothing to do with your chance of winning.
But has something to do with the expected winning making it worth the investment.
What do you mean by intermediate levels? In the 2 main US lotteries the only award that gets split is the single jackpot. Even the 2nd place award is $1 million and is not divided among multiple winners.
And now we also have the long-term effects of online sports betting to look forward to.
Can someone explain to me how the EV can be so incredibly low? I know the answer is because people will buy the tickets no matter what, but even compared to other losing games the lottery comes away looking like an absolute bandit.
A run on the simulation (n=1000000) comes back with -92% EV. It looks like -10% [1] is a rough estimate for slot machine EV, which I would ballpark into the same game genre (-EV, no skill entertainment) as the lottery.
What accounts for this payout discrepancy in what I would consider similar games? On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before?
[1]* https://www.888casino.com/blog/expected-value
Because you shouldn't use the simulator to calculate the EV, or said differently your n=1000000 is too small.
Assuming you used the first lottery example (Mega Millions), the EV is easy to calculate directly and is -$0.66/ticket, ie -33%
The jackpot is a whole $1 of that EV! Without it, the EV is -$1.75/ticket, ie -87%, which is closer to what you got in the simulation.
Exactly.
In short, the simulator doesn’t buy enough ticket-draws to approach the Law of Large Numbers.
But that’s also a feature of the lottery — most people overestimate their ability to win or underestimate how many lifetimes of consistent play is required to statistically win a jackpot.
I don't think people actually make that mistake. They know the chance of winning is tiny. The point is more that a non-zero chance of life changing money (plus the entertainment of fantasising about a win) is worth more to them than the cost of the ticket.
Exactly, winning the lottery is massively life changing. This is actually something I think people don't understand about the psychology of lottery. In some regards it doesn't matter if the money is $50M or $500M for most players even though that has a huge impact on the EV.
this was my approach when i lived in oregon. i played the state lottery which was something like 20x better odds, granted the jackpot was usually like $6 million after cash out, but that was still totally good in my book. it cost a buck and i got to have fun with the idea of it for a few days.
one time i get like 20 weeks in a row up front (a post-dated ticket) and i won $56 dollars or something one week. i did the odds of that happened and it was something that would happen like once every 30 years if i played weekly. i stopped after that, haha.
>On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before?
federal-level gambling syndicate isn't something that a private party can easily jump into.
so the answer is : a mix of 'grandfather'd-in' and protectionism, if we're talking U.S. here.
> What accounts for this payout discrepancy
Mega lotteries draw once every 2-8 days. Slot machines / video poker / etc are happy to draw as fast as you can push the button. They are designed to take your money, but their rewards systems are completely different.
Also, the mega lotteries benefit from viral marketing, “earned media”, and water cooler talk. Slot machines are just a way for bored people to pass the time, much like video games or doomscrolling.
In the US at least they're a state monopoly
Because a lot of the proceeds go to school districts.
I think this lottery simulator is a scam. I played a hundred thousand games and never made my money back.
You obviously haven't played enough. You stopped right before you hit it big!
You were due for a big win.
You forgot the /s.
the expected value of each ticket is negative, but going from 0 tickets to 1 ticket, increases your chances of a big win by infinity.
Going from 1 to n tickets, isn’t necessarily wise
On the other hand, if I don't buy a lottery ticket, I have no chance to waste my money on the lottery, but if I do buy a ticket, the odds of wasting money are infinitely higher.
Estimated monetary value might be a wiser metric to use :)
Going by the calculator, EMV of going from buying 0 tickets to 1 is -$1.85 for Mega Millions, same as going from n to n+1; n >= 0. The first ticket is the first one you lose with, statistically.
That's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize. Whereas if I play at all, at least there's a chance, however remote, of a quite life-changing positive event happening. So, therefore, it makes sense to put a very small amount of totally throw-away income into big-prize lotto tickets, just so you're in the game at all.
Based on this kind of thinking, my personal rules are: never spend more than 0.1% of take-home pay per time-period buying tickets, and only buy big-prize lotto tickets that have potentially-life-changing payouts.
This is almost exactly how I think about it too - a good repeatable mental model is "infinite upside / near-zero downside".
These massively asymmetric choices occur elsewhere in life, e.g. "asking them out on a date"; "asking for a raise", and are good to look out for.
Dunno, seems wild to compare positive-but-still-unlikely ev things with straight up negative ev things like gambling.
There's a near-zero possibility that the next potato chip in the bag has been laced with cyanide. But if you never eat any potato chips, there's a definite 0% chance that you'll die of cyanide-laced potato chips.
This kind of thinking never holds up when it's a small chance of a horrible outcome.
How many potato chip killers have there been?
How many lottery winners?
More people have died from toxic food than won the jackpot.
> However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize.
I'm not sure about that. There is some chance of someone random buying a ticket and gifting it to you and then that ticket winning. Not a big chance. But it is not 0.
In the real world, there's a non-zero chance that someone purchased a ticket on your behalf without you knowing, so you're never quite at 0
Your chances were 0, you buy a ticket, and now your chances are x. Where x is not infinitely greater than 0, it's x greater than 0. Pretty sure your proposition implies that 2 tickets provide the same odds as one ticket (2 infinity vs 1 infinity).
I haven't gotten into the discrete math in many years. If you're right do you mind explaining please? I can intuit what you're getting at. 0 odds * inf < (odds with one ticket). Is that a decent description?
Odds for N tickets as odd(N):
odd(0) = 0
odd(1) = X, so odd(1) / odd(0) = +Inf increase in odds of winning vs 0
odd(2) = 2X, so odd(2) / odd(1) = 2x increase in odds of winning vs 1
This is nonsense if it's meant to be interpreted as anything but a joke, or as a way to maximize your own personal fun.
If you send me $20k of bitcoin and a UUID, I will run 'crypto.randomUUID()', and if I get the same UUID as you I'll send back $40k.
If you don't send me any money, you have 0% chance of winning, but if you do send me $20k, you have a mere 1 in 2^122 chance of winning, an infinite increase in your chance of winning, so surely it is rational to do so.
If you truly believe what you just wrote, I'll await my $20k.
I think the saying goes buying a lottery ticket only marginally increases your chance of winning.
I like that logic
But does that mean you only buy 1 lottery ever in life or one each lottery?
Just when the numbers get big :)
To believe that you take a chance and you suddenly get the prize, despite statistics, is to believe that you're special. Maybe some people try such things to return the warm feeling of the early pre-school years.
Humans are so weird... No matter how simple you make a slot machine, for some reason it's still compelling to play.
On one of my runs, I won $1 million which put my numbers in the green for a while before slowly going into the red again.
That's going to legitimately brighten the rest of my day.
I won! That's it, the lottery is worth playing if only I can repeat this performance IRL.
I won the $340,000,000 Powerball Grand Prize after buying 11,651,310 $2 tickets leaving me with a grand total of $319,781,766 in earnings ($27.45 per ticket).
Interesting. You got it at 11.6M tickets... I got it at 10,847,948.
On the subject of winning the lottery, the story that goes untold is of the MIT crew that gamed Massachusetts' Cash Windfall circa 2007.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...
There's a movie out starring Walter White, of the Selbees side, called Jerry and Marge Go Large, but which talks about the story, but portrays the MIT kids poorly for dramatic effect.
https://archive.is/G5Ctz
I got lucky. Won a million bucks early in the simulation and it took a while before the EV was negative again. Should have stopped right after winning a million, duh.
Not sure if anyone linked it here, but my favorite simulator was a 2D grid, with about 50 or so units per side. The computer picks 3 squares, you pick 3 squares. The XxY unit grid was set up such that if you picked the same 3 squares as the computer, it was the same odds as winning Powerball. Seeing how hard it was to even get 1 square really drove home the odds. I also did a similar calculation by estimating the area of millions of quarters (enough to represent the 1/N chance to win) and thought "ok, if I launched a rubber ball randomly at high velocity in this huge room, I would win if it landed on one exact quarter that I picked in advance. When I saw it like that, I realized there's no way.
For years whenever I see lottery numbers announced I first scrawl some guesses on a piece of paper, trying to summon all divine power I can muster.
I think I once guessed 2 of them . This way I get all the thrill of the game with none of the cost.
I could never do that. Imagine the devastation of getting all of them right.
HN user ggerganov made a similar tool with real historical numbers from Bulgaria:
https://lottery-check.ggerganov.com/
Cool visualization!
It would've been nice to not assume only one lottery winner. People tend to pick numbers that are meaningful for them: birthdays, favorite numbers, lucky numbers. Thus it actually significantly increases your EV if you pick unusual numbers, which is not reflected here.
So, for Mega Millions:
For 1-70: Consider numbers above 31 (days of month)
For 1-25: Similarly, numbers above 12 might be less common (months of year)
What other numbers above 31 would you want to avoid? 33, 44, 50, 69, 70? And you might want to avoid sequences as well.
Does this have any way of simulating multiple plays per draw? I'm curious what happens to EV when you buy X tickets per draw instead of just 1. And for both circumstances: (a) ensure all X tickets are unique and (b) random entries with replacement.
Unless you're buying a meaningful fraction of tickets, the EV/ticket will be similar to uncorrelated tickets.
If you're buying all the tickets, well, the math is real easy. (and occasionally profitable, see 1992 in Virginia)
The tool has a maximum speed of 1000 tickets per second, which may not be fast enough for some users. Hopefully the author will consider adding a 'turbo' option to make the simulation faster so we can get more results in less time.
What would be super interesting is to collect all different lotteries from different countries and regions, and run simulations to find which ones are most lucrative. And you can’t treat know how good is your local lottery in comparison.
There was a Romanian economist who was able to exploit several lotteries around the world. He essentially bought every combination to lotteries where the payout was higher than the cost. Logistical nightmare.
https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times
Very cool visualization. This will save me a few bucks next time I think about playing.
Looks a lot like https://www.adamgrant.info/heres-1m-dollars-try-to-win-the-l...
Any chance of multiple bonus numbers like the Euromillions offers?
Yes I was interested to see how different the simulation would be.
Can we add quantum suicide to this simulation?
This is where you entangle your mortal soul to the lottery outcome and are only allowed to survive if you win.
This is a cheat code for the parallel universe crowd.
I'm the smarmy prick who, when somebody says they bought a lottery ticket, I say "Give me the same amount you paid for that lottery ticket, and if you win I'll double your winnings."
Them: "there's no way you could afford to pay me!"
Me: "I won't have to."
Hit a million dollar ticket! BRB going to buy lottery tickets!
Earnings $311,509,052 over 16,680,000 tickets
Average: $18.68 per ticket
This is exactly why I don't play the lottery
So, you will lose 1.84$ on each ticket you buy.
Now I just need to scrape the data on all major lotteries worldwide, plop them all into the simulator, make some assumptions about exchange rates and figure out where in the world I should bet on the lottery to get the best payout!
No need to simulate. It is generally straightforward to compute the odds directly from the rules.
For sure, but not as fun to watch!
Australia's Saturday Lotto is one of the better ones I believe (1 in 6,000,000 or so I think).
[dead]