People got unseasonably lucky (Texas lottery div). Questions were raised here. Someone good with numbers tried studying it a couple years back.
But now this: Abstract: Some people have all the luck.
We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the “plausibly lucky” from the “implausibly lucky” by solving optimization problems that take into account the particular games each gambler won, where plausibility is determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a million. Dealing with dependent bets relies on the BKR inequality; solving the optimization problem numerically relies on the log-concavity of the regularized Beta function. Subsequent investigation by law enforcement confirmed that the gamblers we identified as “implausibly lucky” were indeed behaving illegally.
Naw. It isn’t implausible. It is schoolbook Darwinism at work.
Oops, … the math doesn’t add up? Well then, math is wrong, right?
Retro: Here’s what happened when a math whiz tried figuring it out.
(Buy Lotto and make the government and smart folk rich. Hey, someone has to. 😉 )
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