I've played the Powerball simulator for 1,092 years and have lost 91% of my money

Ludicrous speed!

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Yeah, I can’t wait for season 2 of “Better Call Powersall.”

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The payouts for all but the top prize are fixed. If you match 5 numbers, you get a million dollars, regardless of whether the jackpot was $20 million or $1.3 billion. If you match 4 numbers the payout is $100. (And the odds of either of those outcomes is pitifully slim.)

spending 1.5 billion, between now and the next drawing, might do it.

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I like to think of it as division: you have: very_small_chance / 0.0 = infinity ( I KNOW it’s not infinity, it’s undefined); so 1 ticket is infinitely better than no ticket.

Similarly, I think of the 2nd ticket as the most cost-effective way to double your odds. Diminishing returns after that…

Maybe I’m saying the same thing as you?

/if this was /r/trees, there’d be a [7] in here somewhere…

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But wouldn’t the increase in splitting (really the decrease in your winnings) be a very small increase? Seems to be that, sure pseudo-random-number-generators (PRNGs) have flaws, or dice that aren’t obviously tampered with(1) will be so close to “fair”, at least for lotteries in the 10-100million range, it would be very hard to spot?

Some of the flaws in PRNGs seem vanishingly small. Sure, technically, not “fair”. But if the flaws are at the 1-in-a-billion level I think we’d never notice at the lottery level.

I have no evidence or learnings that qualify me in this subject. Just gut feel.

  1. For instance, if a die has drilled-out and paint-filled dots, the 6 side must be lighter(2) or heavier(3)

  2. Assuming they don’t correct for this, and I’m sure they do, 'cause if I thought about it, it’s not that complicated.

  3. Does the extra paint in the 6 dots combined make up for the opposing 1? But now I think the 3 pairs of opposing faces always add to 7… to the dice box!

You use Casino dice, flat faced pips, edges like a razor.

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But I just realized… it is better to use the PRNG, not pick your own. Pick your own is worse because people are crappy RNGs… the “birthday effect” alone highly biases 1…12 and 13…31, lucky numbers like 7 or 11, etc.

Speaking of which, 7 is the dominate lucky number in my culture (white, middle-aged, north North American male). And I think 11 is big in some Eastern Asian cultures.

Which leads me to wonder: what other lucky numbers are there? And why?

I think 7 is considered lucky as it’s the number of moving celestial objects visible to the naked eye: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. There’s probably many other reasons…

/reply-to-self… I hope I don’t break nuthin’

1.3 billion…that’s about 650 million votes cast that say wealth isn’t earned or worked for, its awarded

Maybe Powerball should declare its personhood and run for President?

The Citizens, United, will never be defeated. :frowning:

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and new ones each time… ( or some interval. casino dice last one thrower at the craps table and are then put into the bin for reselling to the tourists or just given as a consolation prize to the thrower. those guys are way serious about no cheating )

Just like every form of gambling, the house always wins.

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On the other hand, the first ticket improves your chance of winning by 1/[total possible outcomes].
The second one improves your chance of winning by 1/[total possible outcomes].

Yes, the same.

Wait a minute. This is misleading, because your total chance of winning is 2/[total possible outcomes]. Still slim to none, but you have doubled your own chances.

Playing the Powersall simulator for 1092 years sounds like an excellent science fiction premise to me. I’m picturing an ominously powerful near-future Tesla’s R&D department somehow virtualizing (the original) Tesla to be the protagonist.

It’s actually a good strategy from amathematical point of view as well.

If you have a lottery where the jackpot prize rolls over if it isn’t won, the expected return from buying a ticket for a draw with a huge jackpot can be positive, because you have the potential to win money wagered by players in previous draws.

However, it’s still not worth buying loads of tickets in that situation, because the expected positive return has such a high volatility that it’s still overwhelmingly likely that you’ll lose it all.

Why do people refer to it as “winning” if they didn’t actually do anything? Random chance is not any sort of victory. Something skill-based, like the outcome of a chess game, would be a win.

Because that’s the word we know for that?

Words can have more than one meaning, you know. I’m sure that in a perfect logic-based language (created by advanced AI civilizations from space, let’s say) that sort of semantic overlap might be considered unacceptably imprecise and messy to be usable, but English ain’t it.

Got any suggestions for a better way of referring to success in skill-independent acts of gambling, betting and assorted risk-taking? Now I’m curious about how that might look like.

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That was my point. How is it any sort of success? “success in skill-independent acts” itself seems like a contradiction in terms. I suppose I’d lump it under the label of “random stuff that happens to people”. If it’s a random event, it isn’t very noteworthy.

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