"Roy L" wrote in message
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"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Roy L" wrote in message
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I am one of the people who no longer
believethe UK LOTTO is random. I sent several letters some years back to
Camelot requesting that they actually state that it is random. No
replies. Then they changed the name of the game from LOTTERY to LOTTO.
Check the meaning of lottery. What was the real reason for the change?
Frightened of getting sued if the truth was discovered?. Average Joe
public does not understand how easy it is to construct an apparently
random ball selector using OCR or embedded RFID. Why on Wednesdays can
you not buy a ticket after 7.30 when the draw is not announced sometimes
until very late?. Has there ever been a draw where there were dozens of
people sharing the jackpot?
I smell fish....

Roy


It's an interesting thought, but OCR or embedded RFID ? That would be a
bit obvious in terms of it requiring physical hardware to implement, and
a whole host of people from the designers to the programmers and machine
constructors who would all need to keep their mouths shut about it. I
think that might be taking conspiracy theories a bit far, really, and
that the smell of fish is drifting up the road from your local chippy ...
!! d;~}

Arfa
Hi Arfa, agreed - keeping the silence would be the hardest part of the
operation although it probably could be done with a stringent penalty
contract for everyone in the know.
Although I dont believe the lotto is random - they would have to let me
examine the internals of the draw machine to convince me - I still am a
member of a syndicate at work. We have been using the same set of 7
numbers "wheeled" for 6 years and never had a sniff. We usually average
about 3 to 4 wins of 40 quid per year. Maybe we are using a set of numbers
that too many people are also using! The fish reference was a bit tongue
in cheek - although I dont live too far away from Fleetwood!

Roy

LOL ! I really don't think that you would manage to get as many people
involved as would be needed to keep it 'illegally' quiet - there's always
someone with high morals and ideals. In the 14 or 15 years that it's been
running, one of them would have surfaced by now, and blown the whistle. If
spies who sign the official secrets act on threat of imprisonment are
prepared to whistle-blow, I'm sure you would not manage to keep such a fraud
on the population secret for this long, given how many people past and
present would have to be in on it.

I actually had a look at the stats late last night, and the 'popularity' of
the numbers, draw-wise, ranges from around 150 I think it was, to 199, which
seems a fairly random-ish result. Statistics is a funny old business, and
you can show patterns in any set of reasonably complex data that spans 15
years. Governments do it all the time. Also, there seemed to be a number of
occasions listed where there *were* multiple winners. Given the extremely
long odds of winning even a fiver, let alone the jackpot, is it actually
that surprising that there is relatively few occasions on which there are
two or three winners, let alone dozens ? I actually think that your personal
syndicate stats of three or four wins of forty quid a year, are quite good !

If we accept that no technical or mechanical fiddles are going on with the
machines, ball sets, people involved etc, then I still think that the types
of machine used for the various lottery draws *have*, purely by the way they
operate, to be the most effective way of generating the closest thing to a
truly random number, a series of which must be pattern-free, other than
'natural' patterns which will always be there to be found in data, if you
look for them hard enough ...

Anyways, it's been an interesting discussion as always, that has now
wandered far from my original thoughts. Tomorrow, the unit in question will
go back top the shop which took it in, for them to inform its owner that
sadly, it is not what they thought it was ...

Anybody wants to add any other comments to this thread, I'm happy to keep
going. Thanks all.

Arfa