Org Experiment Chat Thread

[Brettus]

fallout: I'm not fooling myself into believing this or trying to make others think anything either, as stated there is no reason why the wisdom of crowds should work on probability but still its a bit of fun.

Almost at the 50 mark already, I'm more amused by the idea of this than I should be, some clear leaders at the moment that have been selected 10 times, every number has now been selected at least once now too.

definitely interested to test out Owenski's idea of see which org member would win biggest (if anything) I'm curious to see if you put 50ish lines on, if you would make your money back, logic suggests not but I'm not sure on the odds of 5 small wins over 50 lines, 1 in 10 doesn't sound that far out of the way for matching 3 numbers.

[Fallout]

Interesting way of choosing the numbers. I would've expected you to choose the 6 highest mode average numbers. How did Derren do it?

Edit: I hear you in the post above. It's definitely an interesting investigation into trends and popular numbers at least! I want my £500 though!!!

[Brettus]

Originally Posted by Fallout

Interesting way of choosing the numbers. I would've expected you to choose the 6 highest mode average numbers. How did Derren do it?

They are the 6 highest mode, I just probably wasn't very clear about it. Derren's thing was getting the people to watch lottery broadcasts for a couple of weeks and concentrate on the numbers, predicting each week, then by the 3rd I think it was, they got it spot on.

Here's a quick snapshot of the results table so far:

I think its interesting on the side sorted by ball number that the numbers with just a single showing so far are scattered reasonably regularly through the range, I expected them to be in the higher section given peoples tendencies for familiar numbers like birthdays etc.

just to be absolutely clear, although I throw in the odd phrase I know **** about probability and the mathematics behind it all, I'm just playing with the numbers in an excel sheet. I'll try and show my working when I post the final selection of numbers I'll play. As I say I'll likely play a few lines, highest mode, lowest mode, random variation including average number and average spread perhaps, meaningless but ultimately its all arbitrary anyway as it is supposed to be random.

I'm always open to suggestions too, and of course the numbers are there for everyone to see so if you want to work it out and weight it a particular way then feel free to grab the numbers and play a line, I'm not trying to monopolise this at all. I just wanted as large as possible sample size of human suggested numbers and I don't have many friends

Plus as we all know, there is nothing the org can't do

[Fallout]

The only strategy I know of that is based in logic is to attempt to select the least popular numbers. The logic being that, your chance of winning is exactly the same, but your chance of having to share it with someone else is reduced. I would imagine there will be a lot of people who just play 1,2,3,4,5,6 (for whatever deranged reason) and if you win with those numbers, you're going to be sharing it with lots of people.

So perhaps your best bet is to choose numbers with the lowest occurrence. Same chance of winning, but probably less chance of sharing.

[dizzyblonde]

I hated probability with a vengeance when I did maths.....it gave me nightmares at school.


Just pic some random numbers, and stroke a lucky dog statue, and believe it will give you luck

[Brettus]

Morning All, more waffle from the educated idiot (phrase coined because I've managed to pick up enough terms to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about but I have only a slight grasp on how to use them and I don't want to mislead people, although I'm sure none of you will mistake me for a genius )

Right, after 4 of the last 5 submissions have been what I consider "birthday" lines, where no numbers are higher than 31, the table colouring looks like this:


The only number above 31 that has a high enough representation to show green is 36. I'd imagine given a 10x sample size even this little wrinkle in the data would average out.

Next on my plan for playing with numbers is to stick them into some graphs, yes I am that sad. But the neat thing here is it is real data from real people, virtual lottery tickets will be at the ready tonight and I'll try and post up the results tonight, should be done and dusted by 9:30 looking at the tv schedule.

I haven't watched a draw in years, I play online by subscription so I just get informed when I've won £10 every 8 months as it usually is

[Brettus]

Right, I think what I have constructed now is infact a fully operational lottery simulator. with a few tweaks(randbetween in the results, a loop, counter and break) it could probably be set to run and find out how many weeks it would take before one of us hit the jackpot but I haven't gotten that bored yet and my macro skills suck.

So, if anyone wants a look at the sheet, the grey cells are calculation or don't need editing cells. The light orange cells are "input" cells, so inputting the guesses and then the actual results.

The rest is calculated, I've haphazardly applied some conditional formatting so that the numbers which match a main ball on the submission list turn green, those that match a bonus ball turn red. This was great for a quick glance I thought but then created some columns that check for matches and the end result is summed up in column W, labelled result. Match 3 turns green, Match 4 turns blue, match 5 turns dark cherry, match 5 plus bonus turns brighter red and Jackpot turns the brightest red (with text to match the criteria of course)

http://www.brettnet.co.uk/temp/OrgLottery.xlsx
Just over two hours left if anyone else wants to put some numbers forward.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far people!

[Mr Speirs]

Cant seem to see that.

So what numbers are you going with?

[Brettus]

Right, the ticket has been purchased, I placed 5 lines:

• Org most popular selection
• Org least popular selection
• Actual most drawn
• Actual least drawn
• Longest undrawn

Best of Luck people!
Thanks for the help and amusement

[littleoldman2]

I cannot be bothered to check. So tell me did you win ?.