Based on Derren Brown’s magical formula to win on the lottery, I hacked together a little bit of code to try and win the upcoming EuroMillion draw (yes, I know I’m sad).
The code generates random tickets with 5 unique numbers between 1 and 50 and 2 potentially non-unique numbers between 1 and 9. For example:
Ticket{numbers=[1, 14, 17, 21, 28], stars=[5, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[2, 6, 8, 25, 43], stars=[1, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[12, 23, 30, 36, 41], stars=[5, 4]}
Ticket{numbers=[8, 19, 28, 37, 41], stars=[5, 9]}
Ticket{numbers=[6, 20, 22, 28, 30], stars=[5, 6]}
Ticket{numbers=[2, 3, 33, 36, 40], stars=[9, 2]}
Ticket{numbers=[20, 26, 30, 39, 50], stars=[6, 5]}
Ticket{numbers=[11, 13, 22, 30, 38], stars=[3, 6]}
Ticket{numbers=[10, 14, 17, 45, 47], stars=[8, 7]}
You’ll notice that the numbers are sorted in increasing order, except for the stars. If you then take the average of the numbers at each position, you’ll get the “winning” number, or so the magic goes.
The interesting bit though, which I’m curious about, is that if you generate more than 100 or so tickets in one go, the average is always the same. Why is this, and does it make sense?