The Powerball lottery jackpot, which now stands at $20 million, is tough to win — and sometimes, nobody wins it.
It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game. To get an idea of just how long the odds are, software engineer Andrew Arrow built a clever little program that randomly generates six lottery numbers (including, naturally, a powerball), and then spits out an infinite set of random guesses, counting how many matches the computer finds.
In the time it took us to write this post, the applet made 5,467 guesses and never matched more than two winning numbers on the same ticket.
Of course, the trick of playing the lottery is that the belief you might win the jackpot can be neurobiologically as satisfying as actually winning. In which case the lottery isn’t a tax on people who are bad at math; it’s cheap entertainment.
(HT: Jennifer Godwin)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
“It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game.”
there is no “skill” involved so it is not “hard” or “easy”
“…it’s cheap entertainment.”
and that basically sums up everything in a neat package.
thanks for the posting and the links in the blog though, they were an entertaining read and it cost me nothing!
(except some time…)
Saying you have to match 6 numbers is technically true, but could be misleading. Most people would assume you have a 1-in-10 chance of matching each number, when really it is a 1-in-99 chance. I don’t know exactly how the drawings work, but don’t they have 99 balls circulating in 6 tanks. So in each position you have a 1-in-99 chance of getting the correct number? By making each ball a double-digit number they effectively reduce your odds by 90%(for just one ball) while in people’s minds the odds are much better (“I just have to match 6 numbers!”, when they really have to match all 12 numerals and in the correct order!).
I highly doubt that I will feel just as satisfied if I win the lottery or just knowing I might win. But, I have never played the lottery and wouldn’t know that for sure.
Playing “the lottery isn’t a tax on people who are bad at math; it’s cheap entertainment.” That’s funny.
I just wonder if the sensation of satisfaction is greater when the lottery player has lower income than average or higher. My guess is that the lottery player with higher income than average feels less satisfaction playing because they don’t worry so much of financial matters as much as lower income players do. So the fantasy of winning for someone with less income player is more satisfying than the higher income player.
The program you link to is flawed. In order to win any Pick 6 or Pick 5+1 game in the United States, you merely need to match the numbers. That program only counts a match if it matches the number in the exact position. That makes the odds harder (in the hundreds of billions instead of hundreds of millions).
that program is flawed since it does not count a number correct if it is in a different order. For example if the 4th number in the first guess is 8, and the random number generator picks 8 as the 2nd number at some point, that is not considered a correct pick.
If you play the lotto/tax , you should always play at least one number above 31 so you have better odds of not splitting the pot.
I did a sociological science project in school where I polled lotto players about how they chose their numbers. They gave various reasons — and some choose randomly, i.e., having no specific reason — but one common way is to use one or more important dates (birthday, anniversary, etc.). Certainly not everyone uses dates, and some dates could have numbers above 31 if the year is included.
But enough people do use dates, that it makes sense to always pick at least one number outside the month-day ranges. Doing so doesn’t improve your chance of winning the lotto, but it does improve your chance of not splitting the pot if you do win. This also rules out using a randomly generated “quick pick” unless you are allowed to choose a set with a number greater than 31.
It is a tax for people who are bad at math. Weather the feeling of buying ten $1 lottery tickets outweighs a $10 movie ticket for any individual may define it as cheap entertainment or not.
The expected outcome from playing the lottery is something like 30 or 40 cents on the dollar (including consideration for taxes, multiple winners, but not including the marginal value of a dollar to a multimillionaire vs. the marginal value of the dollar at risk). In contrast a hand of Blackjack correctly played has an expected outcome of something like 97 cents on the dollar.
Steve (#5) is correct. The program you link to matches only on exact permutations, not on combinations. The odds of matching six numbers in _any_ order is far higher than what that app indicates. (Though it’s still not wonderful.)