| I've had a feeling that certain state scratch off lottery games can be beaten thanks to certain actions the states take in the name of transparency. For example, they publish daily reports of the number of prizes remaining. A simple example is imagine a game with 10 tickets sold for $1 each and a single $9 grand prize. If 1 ticket is sold each day and if the lottery publishes the number of remaining winning tickets each day, then you can just wait 1 day and if 1 ticket was sold and 9 tickets remain and the prize wasn't claimed, well now there is a 1/9 chance of winning $9 and the expected value is even. I started scraping several state for daily numbers and calculating the expected value of each game. Every now and then one gets over 100% EV. (Not taking into account annuity discounts and taxes) https://scratchoff-odds.com It's also an excuse to try out a lot of different technology and patterns that would be too experimental for most real jobs, so it's a great side project. I'm currently working on a user section with Clojure, Fulcro (https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/), and Crux (https://github.com/juxt/crux). Another fun little side project that was also an excuse to work with Clojure was https://ezmonic.com/. The app was built with ShadowCLJS, Re-Frame, and ReactNative. I've used the Major System mnemonic to remember things like my credit card numbers and I've always wanted to know how optimally short the mnemonics I come up with are. That app uses the CMU phonetic dictionary to search for an optimal phrase. |
Re: Ezmonic, would be cool to have a live version on the website, so I could try out some numbers that are personally relevant and see if I could remember the system, before deciding to download the app.