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September 21, 2007

Strange But True!

Q. What mistake do United Kingdom national lottery players routinely make, some 10,000 of them each week? Or maybe it's not a mistake. They could still win, couldn't they?

A. All things are possible, picking 6 numbers out of 49. But consider: If they (and their descendants) purchased a ticket every week and kept at it until the year A.D. 136,467, they'd have about a 50 percent chance of winning on this 1-in-14-million proposition. (Never mind how much they'd have spent on tickets by then.) Now on this lightning-strike day of winning far in the future, there's another downside. The jackpot would have to be divided equally with the rest of the 10,000 winners, because that's the typical number of players selecting the 1 2 3 4 5 6 combo, says “New Scientist” magazine. Is this a sort of tongue-in-cheek selection, since most people feel that any set with an obvious pattern is an unlikely winner (actually, all patterns are equally likely to win). Or just maybe they don't care. Playing is fun, the investment is small, the money goes to social purposes, and in the off-off-off chance they do win, several million bucks divided by 10,000 still leaves plenty for a nice night out on the town.


 
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