A lottery ticket doesn't buy a chance, it buys a pleasant daydream. It buys a mental escape hatch. It buys the 'what would I do' game for another week.
A movie costs $12 in a theater for 2 hrs of enjoyment. A lottery ticket costs $1 for a week of intermittent enjoyment. For certain segments of the population, a lottery ticket is a downright bargain.
Math problems are easy. Real world problems are difficult.
As an aside, it's so important that people who care enough about a social challenge like the lottery/gambling addiction are able to find the ACTUAL root cause to address. I'm not blaming the LA Times. I LOVE content like this - and not all content needs a purpose. BUT - if the purpose was supposed to be helping people who play the lottery see their folly, this probably isn't the right tack.
I don't know what he thinks of it, but everyone should give these two pieces (especially the second one) a read. I was absolutely ready to hate it given the title of the first one (I, too, am in the "buying a dream" rationality camp), but the second piece especially was just too damn good.
For the first article the "a sink of emotional energy" needs some proof that it's harmful. Without that it's just the author's opinion.
It's very easy to argue that the fantasy helps people de-stress and ends up improving their lives.
Studies have found that depressed people are better at estimating odds. There's decent evidence that too much reality is bad for your emotional well being.
The second article is even easier to dismiss. To generate excitement the buy in has to be high enough that people feel a bit invested, and the result has to be quick enough that people don't loose interest.
> A lottery ticket doesn't buy a chance, it buys a pleasant daydream. It buys a mental escape hatch. It buys the 'what would I do' game for another week.
Maybe for someone making six figures in the bay area.
In high school, I worked as a stock boy in a convenience/liquor store in a blue collar midwest town. It was obvious a large percentage of the buyers of lotto tickets really couldn't afford to do so.
It's not a popular opinion, but imho, the lottery is little more an government-sponsored exploration of the economically disadvantaged.
Isn't this the wrong problem? It lets you enter X dollars, then it simulates if you played $1 on X numbers of sequential drawings... which would have terrible odds.
Wouldn't it be better to simulate X numbers on Y draws, which would lead you to know the number of times/people would have to play to win.
I don't think probability is communicative, is it?
EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.
It's true that if you play all your tickets in one drawing, you have a higher chance of winning the jackpot at least once, especially as your number of tickets approaches the number of total tickets. However, your expected value does not go up, because you lose the chance of winning the jackpot more than once.
For an extreme example, consider a lottery with only one number, selected from 1 to 2, costing $1 per ticket, with a $2 jackpot.
Buy 2 tickets at once, you lose $2 on tickets, and you get $2 back. Expected net return, $0 (with probability 100%).
Buy 1 ticket per draw for 2 draws, and you have a 1/4 chance of winning nothing (net -$2), a 1/4 chance of winning both jackpots (net +$2), and a 2/4 chance of winning one and losing one (net $0). Same expected value.
Of course, in a real lottery, usually[0] the expected value is negative. So what's happening is like anti-insurance. In both cases your expected value is negative, but you pay the insurance company money to lower your variance, and you pay the lottery money to raise your variance.
[0] Usually? Well, in theory with a cumulative jackpot the jackpot might get high enough to make the expected value positive... except that usually as the jackpot rises, the number of players rises too, such that you have to take into account the possibility of having the split the jackpot, which of course would cut your take in half, or worse.
Shouldn't it stop once you've hit the jackpot? At least until it goes up again? I'd imagine once you've one $800 million, you're not going to be interested in the $40 million reset jackpot.
Not just nearly identical to each other, they're nearly identical to zero. So your odds of winning are effectively the same whether you play or not.
It approaches 1.0 as you buy more tickets, but even at $800m, the lump sum payout of $491m is still lower than the cost of buying all possible $2 tickets ($584m).
And even if you could buy all tickets you still might have to split the winnings...
+1 for pointing out that it is actually a $491MM payout that you can choose to take as a $800MM annuity over 20(?) years.
You also have to subtract taxes from the payout, which also eats into the payout. I would expect it would be 30% or higher, depending on how much you spend on a tax lawyer (which, of course, cuts into the payout as well).
The only[1] way to win is to not play.
[1] Odds are 292,201,338 to 1 of winning by not playing.
To be fair, wouldn't the odds of QuickDraw picking the same numbers twice (even if there weren't a built in limit against that) be the same odds as winning the jackpot in the first place?
Only if you are only picking two sets of numbers. If you are doing 10k sets, the last set has a 9999/292M chance of being the same numbers as one of the other sets.
It's also not clear what the end condition is. I edited the source so that it always picks my numbers, and it just keeps going. So far I've spent $2,734 and won over a trillion.
Right, which is some bullshit. I mean, they cheated. Yes, it is mathematically provable that a random walk will eventually touch 0. That would be the case even if the lottery was strongly positive expected value.
They ask you to comment if you won. Their program guarantees you lose when it terminates -- even if you hit the 1:292,000,000 odds.
That's not true.
1) The title is can you win 800 million in powerball. If you passed 800 million, you win congratulations you did it.
2) It can be impossible to reach 0 even with a random walk.
I think you want to be more precise about "impossible".
It is not mathematically provable that a random walk of finite length will eventually touch 0. Proof by counterexample: the set of every walk of length 1 where you win the jackpot on your first try.
However, consider an infinite random walk. You can fix the first n values of the walk to win the jackpot as much as you want, but as the random walk progresses toward infinity, it is highly probable that you will be on a random walk that tends toward negative infinity. (You might have to play a lot; $437 million of $3 tickets would probably be enough tickets to play powerball for a few lifetimes.)
Yes, it absolutely is. Buy two tickets, your chances double. This is the "don't play the lottery, dummy" for dummies, which is good advice for people that think they have anything more than an infinitesimal chance of winning, and/or pour more than five bucks into a single play.
But there are only two drawings a week, right? If you only bought one ticket with the same six numbers for every single drawing in a year, you could only spend 532$3 = $318/year on lottery tickets. If you wanted to spend $100 on tomorrow's $800M prize, you have to buy 33 tickets against one set of winning numbers.
I have fun idea.. How about all the people on hacker news put $2 in the HN lotto pool:). So I am assuming there are over 50k people that read? Can you imagine if the people on HN win powerball, it will set a precedent. Now, that will be fun:).
I started with their $100 "gift", then moved to a paycheck, then to my annual salary. By the time I was in that deep I decided what the heck and got a second mortgage on my house. TIL I have a gambling problem.
Join lottery pool at work. Might lose $2, but won't have to kill myself if everyone at the office wins and I have to show up everyday remembering that fact.
I find that it's more enjoyable to not join the pool and then buy myself a lunch when the participants inevitably lose. I make sure that everyone knows that it's a celebratory lunch. And then I wonder why I don't have any friends.
i wouldn't take a lottery ticket if you gave it to me for free, but i'd happily join an office pool. for me, the worst part about lotteries is the mental effort required to hang on to and track a ticket; it's sort of the opposite of the entertainment effect that people talk about. but if i could contribute some token amount of money to a social bonding endeavour, and as a bonus fund the entertainment of people who do enjoy keeping track of lottery tickets, and maybe magically have money appear without my having had to do anything for it, it would be worth it.
> the worst part about lotteries is the mental effort required to hang on to and track a ticket
I usually forget about the ticket soon after I buy it. I had my fun dreaming and I don't really need to wait for the draw to absorb jolt of disappointment. I know I haven't won without checking.
I'm genuinely surprised by the popular opinion that people play lotto only to win a nearly impossible jackpot. I rarely play, but when I do it's during the big frenzies like this just for kicks but with decent chances making my money back with a bit extra. I spent $3 (powerball single + multiplier). I won $4 last night by getting just the multiplier right (1:39 odds).
The Mega Millions games has 1:14.71 odds of winning. I'll play both Powerball and MM once or twice a year and my loose accounting on my winnings lands me around +$4. Basically nothing over the years but I have enjoyed the frenzy.
I don't think I fall into "stupid tax" territory and I do understand the probability of a jackpot win. I just don't care about it and enjoy the little rush of the chance.
I saw a theory somewhere that human beings aren't very good at intuitively understanding even large order of magnitude differences between unlikely events. We have a mental category of "unlikely but not impossible" and slot everything from one in a thousand to one in a billion into that bucket.
I.e. the Lloyd Christmas bucket (Dumb and Dumber). "You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?" "More like one in a million." "So you're telling me there's a chance!"
Poker players and literature do this all the time, much to my annoyment. "It's really hard to make a flush" ... no, it's really easy just not very likely.
This image removed any temptation for gambling once and for all, because after all, a 1:292,201,338 chance really isn't anything one can grasp easily:
A car goes from San Diego to New Orleans and the driver throws a quarter out of his window at some point in time.
Now you drive the same route. You get the chance to stop once on this route. If your front tire comes to a halt at the exact same spot of that quarter, you hit the jackpot.
Is the concept to map the distance of the route to the width of the quarter? 1 inch diameter quarter, ~1800 mile route (1.1405e+8 inches) -- off by one order of magnitude... nitpick aside, very clever visual depiction, and easy enough to explain the math. I'll have to remember this one.
Sure, someone will probably be stuck in a traffic jam right next to the quarter at some point, but does that help anyone to win this challenge on purpose? :)
To put it into perspective, a bookmaker in the UK offered odds of 14 million to 1 for Elvis Presley crash landing in a UFO on top of the Loch Ness monster[0].
I recently purchased a OneRNG trng and decided to give it a chance at guessing the right number with its quantum-noise super powers. Reading from it overnight produced 24 million guesses and no winner. Though several were just one number off. Too bad so sad.
I'm really curious what RNG the registers use when people say "let the computer guess for me". I'm pretty sure they don't all have a TRNG installed on the circuit...
"Quick Pick" numbers are not generated at the store. Regardless of if you pick the numbers or let the computer do it, your request is sent in real time back to a lotto office where the real ticket is securely generated (with a TRNG if you so choose). The local terminal then receives a bitmap to print out.
It is based on my reverse engineering of a lottery terminal. I can't vouch for the quality of the RNG, as I alluded to in my previous comment, but the local RNG isn't used in any meaningful fashion.
I can point you in the direction of the MontaVista Linux distribution, which is what most of the terminals run.
Funny that they allow multiple people to pick the same numbers, then.
Why shouldn't they? It's to the lottery's benefit. Two reasons:
1) People are attached to "their" numbers, and would be very upset if you didn't let them pick exactly the ones they want. Alienated players equals lower participation.
2) There are more overlaps when people pick than when the computer picks. Which means that, each drawing, there is a lower probability of someone hitting the jackpot than if all numbers are distinct. Which means the money rolls over and the next drawing has a larger prize. Eventually the prize is $800 million and people get excited and buy even more tickets. It's even being discussed on HN.
What it might do is avoid the bias of selecting numbers that other people are also likely to choose. So you're no more likely to win, but you may be less likely to have to share the jackpot.
I think most of us realize that they're not going to win, but when the jackpot becomes a national event every 6 months or whatever, there's usually some joy in buying a ticket anyway
Something like this happened in Virginia in early 1992. At a certain point, the jackpot/(cost of buying all numbers) ratio was high enough that an Australian business group swooped in, hiring volunteers to purchase as many tickets as possible. They only managed to cover 5 million out of 7 million possibilities (ran out of time), but they still won the lottery, winning a $27 mil jackpot.
It's a genuine scalability problem when you have to work out how to physically print/place that many tickets, and the mechanism by which you distribute the jobs up to all of your volunteers (are they volunteers if they're being paid?)
Also an extra edge to get you over the line - make sure you have a license to sell the tickets to yourself. Usually the vendors (newsagents, shops) etc that sell the tickets get a commission on each ticket ranging from 2% - 10%
Crowdsource ~$146 million and only buy half the lotto tickets. For each of the ~11 million combinations of regular numbers, buy 13 tickets covering half the possible powerball numbers.
Assume you win the $800 million jackpot and lose 50% to taxes, you have $400 million left over. You spend ~$292 million to double your investors money and have ~$107 million left over.
Assume you don't win the $800 million jackpot, you still have 13 $1 million tickets left over. You can either pay that back to your investors, or keep it for yourself and point to a clause in a contract they signed saying that you'd only pay out if you won the jackpot.
Somehow I doubt it's legal to do something like that, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Assume you win the $800 million jackpot and lose 50% to taxes, you have $400 million left over.
Gambling losses are tax deductible as expenses against gambling winnings.
Going with your scenario, if you spend ~$146 million and win ~$800 million, you'll be taxed on the ~$654 million profit. Off the top of my head you're looking at ~$400 million in after tax winnings.
So the investors get their ~$146 million back and then take a share of the remaining ~$400 million.
Used to be, the lump sum wasn't offered -- you had to sell your legal rights to the annuity to an investor to get it. You could still do this -- perhaps have open bidding on it; might net more than 62%.
Question: With a jackpot of $800mil and the chances of winning 1 in ~300mil, could you not buy 300mil tickets? (Excepting, of course, the risk that someone else wins and the cost of taxes).
Splitting the pot and paying taxes on the lump sum or taxes + time on the annuity means that you likely take a net loss buying all the possible numbers.
Well, it sounds like you'd be at least $9 million richer than you were before. And gambling losses are tax deductable, up to the amount of your winnings, so if I understand tax deductions correctly wouldn't you be taxed only on about $200 million of the cash payout?
The comment on the site where some people play when it's a high payout more for wanting to participate in the cultural event (i.e. go see Star Wars in theaters) than the expectation that they'll win makes a lot of sense.
I think that's mainly why I get a few tickets sometimes when it gets super high, even though I know my chances of winning are significantly worse and my chances of winning at all are almost nothing.
It may even out from an expected value for the purchaser point of view, but the profits keep climbing for Powerball the more people that hop on the bandwagon.
I ran the $1000 simulation, and then just before running a $100,000 simulation I stopped myself because I'd be distressed if my simulated numbers came up and I didn't actually get the prize.
>3. It's fun and exciting to use someone else's money to try to come up with a new business type.
Most startups are not able to raise money from outside investors. In fact I'd say outside of the Stanford student/graduate/dropout crowd, it's probably less than 1%. The other 99% also don't get paychecks because they can't draw from investment capital they never got.
In most cases, it takes many months or years of unpaid work before you can even get VC funding or revenue of any type for your startup. And most startups fail before they even reach that state.
You seem to have rose-colored view of startup and what it takes to succeed with a startup.
Your odds of succeeding at a startup may not be better. With powerball, you are risking $2 for 292 million to 1 odd. With startup, you are risking several thousand multiples of $2 in opportunity costs for potential return that might be at best 10x.
As a founder you don't get a paycheck unless you raise decent amount of OPM. There are 100s of founders who fail to raise any funding for every one who raises some. You just don't hear about such founders. Same applies to your point 3. You should talk to people who have raised OPM and the handcuffs they operate with.
Customers (drawn from the rational HN crowd) pick lottery numbers and pledge not to play the lottery for a period of time (selectable from a really cool animated dropdown). At the end of the period we mail them the amount saved on tickets or, in the unlikely event the numbers actually came up, lost by not playing.
As premium paid service, infinite period of time with physical printed yearly reports and cool framed diplomas to hang on the wall.
May be peer to peer lottery tickets as service. I have heard friends/colleagues used potlucked money to buy tickets and if they win share the prize. Have a service for it with nice Web 2.0ish dashboard :P
I agree though if you've worked in the casino industry as long as I have there's precious few other ways to reason about what's going on in the minds of people who don't understand gambler's fallacy.
This is actually not strictly applicable: what SMBC is talking about is a game that is some portion gamble but for which there is a house edge or strategy that you can exploit for gain. A lotto drawing is purely random (read: no skill) so someone with sufficient understanding of the math is no better off than someone who writes in random numbers. The same is true for slot machines.
A movie costs $12 in a theater for 2 hrs of enjoyment. A lottery ticket costs $1 for a week of intermittent enjoyment. For certain segments of the population, a lottery ticket is a downright bargain.
Math problems are easy. Real world problems are difficult.
As an aside, it's so important that people who care enough about a social challenge like the lottery/gambling addiction are able to find the ACTUAL root cause to address. I'm not blaming the LA Times. I LOVE content like this - and not all content needs a purpose. BUT - if the purpose was supposed to be helping people who play the lottery see their folly, this probably isn't the right tack.