A Concise Method of Lottery Prediction

2019/09/15

A Concise Method of Lottery Prediction

Q: The balls are randomly picked, how could you predict?
A: If so, why don’t people usually buy number combinations like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?
Q: That does not look random at all!

In fact, the chance that the next lottery winning numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, is exactly the same as every other combination of numbers, but still, people wouldn’t usually buy number combinations which look like following certain pattern, and this is precisely how the algorithm works for prediting future winning numbers.

In the world of computing, we often hear the term “random number”, surprisingly, it is extremely difficult to make a real random number generator, they are all deterministic in certain ways. There are alternative methods for generating random numbers, for example, Random.org claims to “offer true random numbers”, whose randomness “comes from atmospheric noise”. However, in the context of lottery winning numbers, sampling history winning numbers, we could see certain implicit rules, patterns, or trends, that loosely drive winning numbers in the future.

So, let’s answer the simple question, why doesn’t 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 look random, despite its equal chance of being next winning numbers as any other number combination? To answer this question in a technically sound way, let’s look at the history of PowerBall winning numbers.

10, 11, 20, 27, 28, 30, 31,  2
 2,  4, 14, 16, 19, 27, 29, 13
 8,  9, 11, 20, 22, 27, 32, 20
 3,  7, 10, 11, 17, 26, 35, 19
 7, 14, 21, 24, 27, 30, 35, 13
 1,  5, 11, 16, 17, 29, 30,  8
 9, 15, 22, 23, 25, 30, 35,  6
 1,  3,  9, 11, 22, 23, 24,  4
 1,  6, 11, 13, 16, 23, 27, 11
 6,  7,  8, 21, 27, 28, 34, 16

For the sake of this artical, above are only recent 10 draws of Australian Powerball winning numbers, ideally we should sample as many draws as possible. To figure out the implicit pattern, we need to introduce several ways of analytical quantification for each winning draw:

  1. Calculate the absolute difference between every two numbers in a draw.
  2. Eliminate the same numbers from result of 1, let D be the remaining number of differences.
  3. AC = D - (r - 1), r is the number of numbers in a draw

For example, every two numbers in the draw (10, 11, 20, 27, 28, 30, 31) has absolute differences below:

abs(10 - 11) = 1
abs(10 - 20) = 10
abs(10 - 27) = 17
abs(10 - 28) = 18
abs(10 - 30) = 20
abs(10 - 31) = 21
abs(11 - 20) = 9
abs(11 - 27) = 16
abs(11 - 28) = 17 *
abs(11 - 30) = 19
abs(11 - 31) = 20 *
abs(20 - 27) = 7
abs(20 - 28) = 8
abs(20 - 30) = 10 *
abs(20 - 31) = 11
abs(27 - 28) = 1 *
abs(27 - 30) = 3
abs(27 - 31) = 4
abs(28 - 30) = 2
abs(28 - 31) = 3 *
abs(30 - 31) = 1 *

By calculating the differences between every two numbers in the draw, we got 21 results in total, then we eliminate duplicate results, and end up with 15 distinct numbers, so D = 15; Since there are 7 numbers in a draw, AC = D - (7 - 1) = 15 - 6 = 9.

Apart from the methods above, there are lots of ways to analyse lottery winning numbers. The point is, by turning history winning numbers into several analytical figures, we could apply certain levels of logical inductions, for example:

(with a large sample of history winning numbers)

Now let’s look at the numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), it has:

Now, (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) does look evidently not random, it is too far away from the implicit patterns of history winning draws, just like someone picked it by hand!

And using the rule of logical induction, we could potentially filter out number combinations that are unlikely to be the next winning draw. For example, if the previous three winning draws all have Odd Even Ratio (OE) of 2:5, given that “the same BS or OE has repeated in at most 3 consecutive draws in history”, we could say that the next draw is less likely to maintain the same OE. After applying each induction rule, we could effectively eliminate a large number of combinations which do not follow history trend.

Unfortunately, even after elimination of less likely numbers, permutating the remaining numbers can still get you a long list of draws, the cost of buying all the draws is usually higher than the 1st prize. In this case, we could apply something call Rotation Matrix, to further filter out numbers that are less likely to be winning number. I’ll talk about this when I have time in the future.