[math-fun] lottery thought problem
design a simple-looking powerball-like lottery variant that has three properties: (0) it's easy to determine that a given bet has won after the drawing is made (1) it's nevertheless quite difficult, even for a mathematician, to work out the exact chances that a random bet wins [ this is the hard one. i want to do this via some type of hysteresis related to the ensemble of numbers played in the previous lottery draw, maybe ] (2) it has the property that with probability at most 1/10,000, no one will win even if hundreds of millions of people play every week for one thousand years. -- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/
ugh...i mean, in (3), that there should be no winners at all in one thousand years with probability at least 9999/10000 On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Thane Plambeck <tplambeck@gmail.com> wrote:
design a simple-looking powerball-like lottery variant that has three properties:
(0) it's easy to determine that a given bet has won after the drawing is made
(1) it's nevertheless quite difficult, even for a mathematician, to work out the exact chances that a random bet wins [ this is the hard one. i want to do this via some type of hysteresis related to the ensemble of numbers played in the previous lottery draw, maybe ]
(2) it has the property that with probability at most 1/10,000, no one will win even if hundreds of millions of people play every week for one thousand years.
-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/
-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/
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Thane Plambeck