National lottery changing this Saturday

Azari

The-Truth wrote: »

I can imagine the 4000+ people who have became a National Lottery millionaire since it began probably disagree with you!

Only if they are a little on the dim side.

If 4000 people cross the road without looking and don't get hit, does that make looking before you cross the road 'a mugs game'?

smickle

This is too much for me. Think I may try the Thunderball game instead. I know it's only £500,000 top prize - not millions but still a nice sum and that's guaranteed no matter how many winners there are. The tickets are still £1 I believe plus the odds are much lower to win a prize.

Bye bye Lotto

tgon

Im done with it. They've doubled the cost and the odds so.. pftt.

daytona0

According to the national lottery website (https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/lotto-changes#New-prize-structure):

- They are actually REDUCING your odds of becoming a millionaire from 1 in 14m to 1 in 10m.....

- 10% (1 in 10.3 for 2 numbers) of your otherwise losing tickets would suddenly put you back in contention to become a million+, thus improving your chances of being a millionaire in one of the two draws...

I really like the changes. It is effectively generating more action and also splitting the top prize into the jackpot and a raffle (making it easier to win a life changing sum, and making it less likely for someone to become filthy rich - 1m is plenty enough!).


The other option would have been to REDUCE The numbers and create more instances of people hitting the jackpot (thus creating more winners of smaller amounts), but I could see such a change generating jackpots of less than 1m which would suck, plus there's no guarantee that it will generate more action. Also, the £2 money back appeals to those who know they don't have a chance in hell of winning, but will appreciate being able to save £2 every so often when 2 numbers comes in.

C_Mababejive

People have mentioned that the Irish Lottery is a better. choice but there seems to be a lot of scams linked to the irish lottery.

Is this the REAL irish lottery website?
https://www.irish-lotto.com/

I only ask as the address mentioned on the website seems to be the home of many lotteries not to mention a printing company..

[Deleted User]

Hi,

go into any High St bookie and you will get various lotto options,

eg,

Coral

Ladbrokes

Paddy Power

C_Mababejive

[Deleted User] wrote:

Hi,

go into any High St bookie and you will get various lotto options,

eg,

Coral

Ladbrokes

Paddy Power

Although these are not direct lottery entries but "based on.." and so have lower payouts than if you had played the real lottery of that country,should you be eligible.

paddyrg

daytona0 wrote: »

You'll first need to show that the National Lottery is a "totally random draw"....... I'd argue that it is a "pseudo random draw" personally.

I'd go with genuinely random, a lot of effort has been gone to to make sure physics is the only factor, and to create truly chaotic circumstances inside the machine. It isn't deterministic, or we'd see the same numbers over and over, and OVER THE LONG TERM (which we can say we have good data for now) the number frequency seems well within what we would generally expect.

Pseudo-random usually refers to computer-based randomisers, which are in effect long, predictable lists (really each successive number hashes from a seed, know the seed, and you can predict the next 'random' number). There are some mitigations people take, like seeding to the number of milliseconds since the beginning of computer time, however it is still deterministic.

If you don't feel the balls in a chaotic system is 'random', how would you suggest a truly random draw?

Bollotom

Health lottery is still a quid a game. Course you can only win max £250,000 so probably not good for syndicates but increasing the balls by adding TEN numbers as in the National jobbie puts it in the realms of almost impossibility. :cool:

https://www.healthlottery.co.uk/

daytona0

paddyrg wrote: »

I'd go with genuinely random, a lot of effort has been gone to to make sure physics is the only factor, and to create truly chaotic circumstances inside the machine. It isn't deterministic, or we'd see the same numbers over and over, and OVER THE LONG TERM (which we can say we have good data for now) the number frequency seems well within what we would generally expect.

Aye true, but if you knew both the exact initial conditions and the exact drawing time then couldn't you theoretically map each ball as a particle and produce a result in a chaotic system? I think that it could be possible, but wayyy beyond our grasp. You also have the problem of determining the exact initial conditions.

Not convinced that we have enough data from the national lottery. Don't forget that we have millions of 6 number combinations and the lottery is relatively young! We could look at clusters which will yield smaller combinations but again there just isn't enough data I don't think.

Pseudo-random usually refers to computer-based randomisers, which are in effect long, predictable lists (really each successive number hashes from a seed, know the seed, and you can predict the next 'random' number). There are some mitigations people take, like seeding to the number of milliseconds since the beginning of computer time, however it is still deterministic.

Also true, but you can apply it to non computer-based randomisers too.... anything in nature which produces "random" results but has a pattern.

Smilies

If you don't feel the balls in a chaotic system is 'random', how would you suggest a truly random draw?

Well, I'm by no means a Physics expert but I'd imagine that an 'improved' (or possibly 'random') lottery would be based around the decay of particles, much in the way of Shrodinger's cat. That is probably the most "random" thing we have at the moment, but it beats me how that would be set up

For now a potentially pseudo random lottery draw will suffice as it would be unimaginably difficult to predict (if at all possible!).