I also think you wouldn’t have to buy every single combo. There have to be at least a few million combos that are mathematically impossible to come in. Every sequential series. Every multiplier series. Odd sequential series. Even sequential series. Is 2-4-8-16-32-64 or the like ever going to come in? Millions of combos are statistically impossible. Or are they.
Btw, can you imagine bringing $605 million worth of lottery tickets to your IRS audit? In steamer trunks.
Ummm, no. Every possible combination has an equal mathematical chance of being selected. Or is that statistical?
Mathematics <=> Probability <=> Statistics I assumed he was being facetious, since obviously every sequence has the same probability of being picked. Unless, of course, you think that the ping pong ball with the number 6 on it sees that the numbers 1 through 5 have already been picked and says to itself "Nope, I can't come up now - that would be too weird." In fact, picking something like 1-2-3-4-5-6 can be advantageous, since fewer people might pick it because it's "weird," and you thus have a better chance of sharing the jackpot with fewer people. That's why it's always a good idea to pick numbers with at least one greater than 31, since that way someone who only picks birthdays can't possibly pick your set of numbers.
I wasn’t being facetious. Maybe likelihood is more like it. Flipping a coin is 50-50. In reality, if you flipped it 50 times would it ever really come up heads 50 times? Has a lottery drawing ever come up 123456? 5 10 15 20 25 30? 1 2 4 8 16 32? Statistically yes. Likely?
As I said, unless you believe that ping pong balls or coins can remember how they've come up in the past or can see how the other ping pong balls have come up in that drawing there is absolutely no argument that can possibly support that any ordering has any different probability of coming up than any other ordering. The probability of HHHHHH .... HHHHH has the exact same probability (.5 raised to the 50th power) as HTHTHT ... HTHTHT, TTT ... TTT, HTTHHTHT ... THHTTTH, or any other ordering. The only difference is that you notice as "special" when an ordering comes up that is meaningful to you, and don't notice when any other ordering comes up. I have no idea whether 123456 has ever come up, but since there are more than 300 million possibilities, and the game is played about 100 times a year, I would expect not - just as the overwhelming number of possible orderings have never come up. That doesn't change that they all have the same chance of showing up.
Of course the ping pong balls have no idea or can recognize/remember which balls came up before/after. But in a random environment, it'd be unlikely that they came up sequentially. Notwithstanding the fact that it's just meaningful sequences to us. Throw a deck of cards up in the air. What's the likelihood they come down in suit and number order? Just suggesting there could be combos that can't or won't realistically come up. They could. But again, I'm no mathematician.
The chances that the deck of cards comes up in suit and number order is exactly the same as the chances that it comes up in any other completely specified 52 card ordering - 1 in 8.065817517 x 10^67. That's a really big number (it's 10000000000 times the number of atoms in the sun), so every completely specified ordering is incredibly unlikely, but when you toss the deck one is going to come up. You just don't attach any significance to the ordering for virtually all of those orderings, and it would be virtually impossible for you to predict which one would be the one that would come up.
What about them? If they're typing letters at random there is the same probability that they will type out a Shakespeare sonnet as there is that they will type out a specified set of gibberish of the same length. It's such a small probability that we're unlikely to ever see it, but it is the EXACT same probability as any specific set of gibberish letters run together. We just lump all of the gibberish together as one category, which of course has probability close to 1, because almost everything is gibberish.
I thought you were saying something about meaningless fantasy stats and how you really need to watch the games.
