OT: Oh CanaDuh

It's common in the UK.

No I think that also comes from the UK legal tradition they inherited. It is common to find scratch cards with "winning" combinations in all the popular tat magazines for the brain dead. They usually pay about twice what they win hanging on premium phone lines to collect their prize. And a lot more if they are daft enough to phone from a mobile.

Often the prize is a week in some dire half built shanty town in Spain being pressurised by timeshare salesmen. You get the general idea.

"pols" ?

It is odd that the US taxes certain things so viciously.

Regards, Martin Brown

A guy I know had a "system". He *insisted* that numbers that had come up previously were less likely to come up in the future. So he wrote some program to analyse all the previous results to predict the most likely result each week! I spent a fruitless hour arguing with him that luck has no memory, that 1 2 3 4 5 6 was as likely as any other 6 numbers etc.

I myself invented a "system", when I was in my early teens I think. Say you are betting on a coin toss, start with a 1$ bet. Each time you lose, you double your next bet. Eventually you win. Your winnings are guaranteed to be more then the sum total of your previous run of losing bets up to then. For example, 32 > 1+2+4+8+16. You can't lose! OK you are only up one dollar for this example, but in the long run... or you could triple your bets each time...

I was pretty excited about this and programmed a simulation into my home made kit computer.

I wonder if it is obvious to everyone what the flaw is?

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John Devereux

True, but you can increase the value of /x by avoiding numbers that fit into birthdays etc. which would tend to result in sharing a jackpot. However the chances of winning the jackpot in the first place are so low, it's hardly worth the effort. ;-)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
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Although luck has no memory. Suckers are inclined to bet by choosing numbers like day of week, date, family birthdays etc. This means that although you cannot increase your odds of winning you can very easily decrease your odds of sharing the prize if you should happen to win. Choosing some of the numbers above 33 for instance.

An even odder situation occurred in the Irish lottery which had too many smaller prizes and succumbed to a technical brute force attack by a well funded consortium of businessmen and mathematicians using a computer generated series of bets to mop up enough small prizes to cover the outlay and occasionally netting larger prizes. They waited for a big rollover to make the ultimate play but had to share the jackpot with two other winning tickets.

The rules were altered soon afterwards.

Regards, Martin Brown

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I like to horrify my superstitious relatives by picking numbers in simple arithmetic progressions, especially "unwinnable" sequences such as 1,2,3,4,5,6. Haven't won yet!

I haven't tried this yet, but giving away tickets to strangers may be a way to increase the odds of winning. Better still, buy the tickets, write down the numbers and then destroy the originals.

-- Joe

id

There are two flaws.

That's right, the best actual "bet" would probably be a randomized number - filtered for accidental dates and sequences I suppose.

A tax on stupidity, indeed.

Thanks, never knew it had a name :)

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John Devereux

Hmmm... I was thinking of the flaw that the bet grows exponentially, so you need an infinite bankroll to guarantee a win.

I suppose the other "flaw" is that the expected gain on any individual bet can only ever be 0, and this remains mathematically true no matter the bet value or the history.

--

John Devereux

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There's also the Max Bet rule... plus often a Minimum bet. If min bet =3D $10 and max bet =3D $250, as in some blackjack tables, you can play and lose 5 times before losing for good: bet $10, then $20, then $40, then $80, then $160, then you're out of luck if you lose.

Michael

If you play until you win or until N rounds have passed, you have a

1/(2^N) chance of losing (2^N)-1 dollars versus a ((2^N)-1)/(2^N) chance of winning one dollar.

If you could play forever, you are guaranteed to win one dollar eventually, but you can't play forever. Eventually you will either run out of money, or be unable to find someone willing to take the bet.

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It also assumes that the other party will continue to take the bet for an infinite number of rounds if needed.

Also: what happens if the coin lands on its edge and stays that way?