Beating probability

Since we just finished doing a bit of probabilities in math, here’s an article about how one guy figured out how to beat the lottery.

The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy.
–Lehrer (2010) in Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

However, he decided not to just try to get rich of what he’d discovered. It’s an example of using the power of math for good:

“People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn’t take advantage of the lottery,” [Srivastava] says. “I can assure you that that’s not the case. I’d simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn’t worth my time.”

As a side note, my philosophy about the lottery is that it’s basically a tax on the poor:

[H]igh-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.)
–Lehrer (2010): Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

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