[RKDinOKC]

Wonder how many of those raffle tickets you would have to buy to win versus the cost of actually purchasing one?

Did some chaos theory math on the lottery and was able to kind of pick the winning numbers 80% of the time. Chaos theory is based on the fact there are so many variables you can't predict the actual numbers but you can get close. The actual numbers are called the strange attractors and the predicted numbers will gravitate towards those strange attractors.

They have the winning numbers available on-line for the past two years. I put all those numbers in a database and graphed them were the x is the date and the y is the possible numbers. This shows the distribution of numbers. The pattern of dots for the winning numbers as you scroll down the dates was very interesting. Instead of looking completely random they look more like water drops running down a window. This pattern shows most of the next numbers were within a few numbers of the last numbers. Every once in a while there would be a big jump, but that is what makes the chaos part of Chaos Theory.

So how do you use this to pick the winning number? You take the pattern and determine the spread from the last winning number to the next closest winner on the next drawing. This makes the 5 last winning numbers the strange attractors and the spread how close the predictor needs to be. So if say a winning number was 5 and the spread is 4 your predictors would be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, or 9. That's 9 possible numbers for each of the 5 balls. That makes 9 to the power of 5 or 59,049 possible combinations, the number of tickets you would buy. The larger the spread the more tickets you need to purchase. The idea is to find the lowest possible spread to have the winning numbers in your set of possible combinations.

You don't include the powerball because it is drawn from a separate set of balls where the 5 balls come from the same set of balls.

Now the logistics of purchasing 59,049 tickets. There are 5 entries per card with 5 numbers for each entry. Say you can mark the 5 entries ahead of time or while the clerk is scanning your previously marked cards. It takes the clerk an average of 30 seconds to scan the card and take your money. For 59,049 entries thats 11,810 cards or 98 hours to purchase the tickets. The longest time between drawings is 4 days. It would take 3 people 9 hours a day for 4 days to buy the tickets spending a total of $120,000. Getting 5 balls wins $1,000,000. To make it all equal each person would invest $40,000 to win $333,333 before taxes. Oh and be sure to keep all the receipts for all those tickets because you can expense them off the winnings to pay less taxes.

Does the fact this was entertaining make me a math freak?