Can you Win the Lotto with Math?

when you play a lot of game the chances of you picking the right numbers depend on the game but range anywhere from one in eight million to one in eighty million that makes your chances of winning very low but it is a number game so can you increase your chances of winning with math suppose you play a lot of game where you have to guess three correct numbers from six the odds of you winning are three and six times two and five times one and four that's a probability of one in 20 that you win you watch the lotto drawl for a few weeks and see the following numbers of pool one four six two four six four six two two six four four three one and one to six you notice that a lot of sixes have been drawn and not a single five due to regression to the mean we would expect that over a long period of time all numbers should be drawn the same amount this means that the numbers which have been drawn less in the past should be drawn more likely in the future in order to balance the numbers you've started by a loaded ticket and chooses the numbers which have been drawn the least as these should be more common in the future creating a graph you can see how many times each number has been drawn you see five hasn't been drawn and three is quite rare as well after that one is the rarest your instinct tells you that in order for all the numbers to be drawn an even amount of times five three and one should be a more likely combination to win the next round then other numbers you enter the lotto with the numbers 1 3 and 5 does this really work let's test it in real life the state of Victoria where I live in Australia offers five different lotteries I calculated the odds of winning each and found the best to have odds of one in eight million that particular game involved guessing six numbers from a pool of forty five I researched the history of the lotto game starting in 1972 and added up the weekly number draws for the last forty three years this represents 3156 individual draws and such as seen in the table the spread of numbers is fairly even but the rarest should according to our theory still be pulled more often the six rarest numbers are 44 17 14 27 30 and 35 and now tonight's catalano draw hi everyone Stephan Popovich of the Saturday's lotto draw total price book tonight is over forty three point four million dollars a first ball out tonight number 31 listen tell it's one forgets 235 there's nothing like I've ever seen my other done suppose we got well I didn't win the theory was supposed to increase my chances not guarantee a win but the fact that I didn't even get one number right seems to suggest that perhaps the theory is wrong that's because regression to the mean doesn't actually increase the chances of pulling a number which has been pulled less the balls have no memory of the ball which is pulled before it let alone a ball pulled 40 years ago yet we still expect the balls to be drawn an even amount of times without one being pulled more than other halves can happen can be explained through a simple example currently in my local lotto number 44 has been drawn 253 times or the number 8 has been drawn 312 times the difference of 19% suppose in many years each ball has been drawn another 1000 times each that's 1253 and 1312 draws respectively the difference between these two numbers is only 4.5 percent without drawing one number more than the other the percentage of times each number was pulled will slowly reach the average this is regression to the mean and that is the reason you can't win the lotto with math

Channel: Cognito

Views: 232,704

Keywords: cognito, math, lotto, money, chance, Probability (Measurement System), science, average, statistics, education, draw, numbers, numberphile, parody, planes

Id: bdXyWPdD6wo

Length: 4min 11sec (251 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2015