Blog: Pete Loshin

« New Open Source Business Model using Eclipse | Main | Opening Up the Internet: Craigslist + Yahoo! Pipes = Better Data Searching »

Mining Valuable Intelligence From Random Numbers

Somewhere in my stack of obsolete 3.5" floppy diskettes I've got a spreadsheet that contains some interesting raw data. Long ago I was in the habit of buying a bag of M&Ms from a vending machine in the corporate cafeteria every afternoon: before eating any, I would open the bag, sort the colors, count the M&Ms of each color, and record the totals in a spreadsheet.

The primary benefit I got from that activity was a nice set of data, from which I could infer some general rules about which were the most and least common M&M colors> I also got something to do during the afternoon lull to keep me from falling asleep.

It was the kind of job where most of my co-workers were very bright, but we often had time on our hands; conversation topics included arguing different strategies for getting rich by inventing something really cool--and strategies for winning the lottery.

Now that we have the Internet, and there's an endless supply of data sets to play with, here's a guy who actually came up with something useful on that whole lottery thing: Pattern Analysis of MegaMillions Lottery Numbers.

Can you use the information in this article to increase your odds of winning the big bucks? It's not clear: if the lottery number selection process is truly random, the answer is no. But you could use the numbers, and the techniques, as described in the article, to discover hidden influences on the selection process that might skew the results.

For me, though, the best part of this article is that it takes the question of whether lottery drawings are truly random and then applies a scientific approach to it. And, that all the data is available on the New Jersey lottery website, both in HTML and delimited format for easier processing.

Share: