The Lottery Mathematics, Social Purpose, History, Software Science, Systems
By Ion Saliu, Founder of Lottery Science
Lottery can be presented or analyzed from two perspectives:
The social or historical perspective is not the emphasis here. My special interest goes to the mathematics of lottery.
Historically, the lottery started hundreds of years ago. I prefer the Medieval Italy as the starting point. They drew winners for plots of land named loto in Italian. They use that word even today in English (as in parking lot). They also say allotted in English.
Today, the lottery plays a very important social role. The governments run lotteries in order to raise funds to supplement tax revenues. In my home state of Pennsylvania, USA, for example, they use the lottery funds to help the seniors for life-striving needs such as medicines and food.
The lottery revenues are employed in many needed social services, including education and child-medical assistance. Many cynics, however, call the lottery a tax on the poor.
The gambling perspective does represent mild cynicism. The lottery players, by and large, care less about the social goal of lottery. They play to win big money, first and foremost. That's the perspective that brought all of us here. It's about gambling, mind you. The players want to do their best to help increase their winning chances. And a great human divide starts right there.
Let's start on the left side the negative side. The naysayers always shout: "There ain't anything you can do to improve your chances! Just play blindly, as lottery was meant to be played!" That viewpoint is as old as the lottery itself.
Now, on the right side the positive side (as in mathematics: minus is to the left of 0, plus is on the right-hand side). "I can tame the numbers, as mathematics does. Lottery means numbers; therefore I can improve my chances." That viewpoint is as old as the lottery itself.
I am biased. I do favor the positive viewpoint. I discovered mathematical laws and formulas that support the analytical perspective. I've written also specialized software that simulate lottery as if for thousands of years of drawings. The software validates laws and rules that are part of mathematics, especially theory of probability.
It is the same thing as they do in the stock market. Stock trading has a lot of randomness to it We say, correctly, trading has a specific degree of randomness. Some win (huge profits, at times), others lose badly. The stock markets crash periodically because nobody can "beat" randomness with a 100% degree of certainty. No wonder they call Wall Street the largest casino in the history of the world!
There is an advantage, however, for stock traders with better knowledge and software. My aforementioned Web page, where I presented for the first time the concept of degree of certainty DC, received serious traffic from Wall Street firms in the 1990s and 2000s. It still is visited (and mentioned) by stock brokers.
The first lottery systems, followed later by gambling systems, were based on observation. It all happened long before the computers were invented. Such manual gambling systems are still in usage today, especially by old players and women. The so-called paper-and-pencil systems, for example, count how many times lottery numbers were drawn and how they were paired. It is a first-hand example I used in 1985, when I came to the United States as a refugee. I had no computer (I bought my first personal in 1986!)
The negative camp will stress two points in the modern era. One is a reminiscence of the mysticism era: fetishism. The other is pseudo-mathematical. They represent the facts in a fashion that belongs to fetishism. They claim, in a vocal manner: "The lottery is random" as if there were other phenomena that are non-random! The fetishism factor: "The lotto balls don't have memory" as if plastic balls were human beings to remember rules!
The numbered lotto balls "don't have memory" but can be analyzed mathematically for the purpose to win. The lottery balls are numbers following probability and statistical rules. Indeed, the lotto balls can have engraved on them words, even images, instead of numbers; e.g. cat, dog, fish some of the favorites in the virtual world! However, the numbers make mathematics possible and therefore human life easier. It is far easier to represent two dice as 2-1, instead of dog-cat! The sum of the two faces is sanely easier to deal with as 3 instead of catdogsum!
The lottery organizers are more increasingly hostile to computers. The point is, even a random number generator with some built-in lotto filters can improve the winning chance mathematically. The "secret" is in repeating the generating process several times. The winning lotto combination will not come out in the first random-number iterations. But, by repeating the process, as I often say, we compress the time (plus we save money).
Even if the lottery commissions would decide to make the usage of computers much harder and replace numbers by words/pictures on lottery balls people would still convert the words back to numbers! The conversion from graphics to numbers can be easily done in specialized software. It would only be more tedious to copy-and-paste cat dog fish kotkoduck kokostirk zombie instead of 1 2 3 4 5 6. Right! Can you imagine a lotto play slip with images instead of numbers? How about the tickets with your cats and dogs and sharks on them and then checking the ticket for winning at a lottery agent?!
Numbers are, actually, indices or, better still, indexes! If cat gets index #2, that she-lotto-ball is also even. But if cat gets index #1, that he-lotto-ball is odd! Extending to other forms of gambling: Who could play craps if 7-sum was replaced by catfishsum?! There is NO database or collection of items without an index field or ID period!
Humanity advanced especially by tooling the number. The Classical Greeks or Romans were far more skilled in language matters and philosophy and oratory than we are in the modern era. But they had far lower skills handling the numbers than humans starting with The Renaissance. Humanity could have not survived without numbers and numeric analysis.
One caveat of lottery systems: Since they are manual, or pencil-and-paper, such systems do NOT differ from ordinary random selection of lottery numbers. You'll find lots and lots of false lottery systems, including on eBay. "Add 123 to your pick-3 number, then deduct 212. Play the new pick-3 lottery number!" Such "systems" resemble mockery, even insanity; yet, it must be that they are taken seriously since they are sold or featured all over the virtual world! Indeed, naysayers, you right! It takes some effort doing that type of "analysis and system development" and all for naught! It is far easier to use a good random number generator as the one you'll find at this website (in the footer of most pages). Just run the random generator several times before playing. That way, you compress the time while saving money.
There are millions of lottery software packages, if you ask the crazy Google Kids. It is humanly impossible to have, in this world, 36,800,000 lottery software packages (I did a search!) That is plain wrong and deceiving! In any event, there are probably thousands of lotto software titles in this gigantic world of ours. But are them all worthy? The immediate and uncontested answer is NO. Alas! Only LotWon or Parpaluck software is truly a mathematics-founded collection of lottery software, covering just about any type of games.
On the other hand, there must be some other acceptable lottery software programs out there. Don't so many players swear by them? Aren't there so many lottery forums where players get together and talk about lotto strategies, and lotto systems, and, yes, lottery software?! Just visit a few of the many public places (lottery forums):
We can identify common sine qua non features for the lottery software.
1) The lottery software must start with data files: The real results, or past winning numbers, or past lottery drawings. A piece of lottery software is absolutely worthless if it doesn't process, at minimum, an amount of past winning numbers.
The most advanced lottery programs simply count how many times each lotto number came out. That is raw lotto frequency analysis and it is largely meaningless.
2) The user should be able to easily create and update the data file. That is, the software user (lottery player) should easily insert the real drawings as they occur or going back in time and downloading a results file. Better still, the lottery results (past winning numbers) should be in the simplest and easiest format: text (ASCII).
Most lotto software packages are nothing more than collections of past lotto drawings from several lottery games in a country. You'll read outrageous claims such as: Our lotto software has hundreds of programs or hundreds of systems! What they are saying is that they sell hundreds of results files they collect from the Web sites of dozens of lottery commissions!
99% of the fees players pay for lotto software is for lottery drawings that are otherwise free to obtain via the Internet! And the lottery drawings files are called programs or, more glitzily, lottery software applications! Take the freebies for US $20 a pop!
No lottery player and computer user should ever pay for lottery results. They are free to copy-and-paste or download all over the Internet. This resource is valuable in this regard:
The right program must work with hundreds of results files (past winning lottery numbers) for the same type of game. If the software is for 6-number lotto games, then the program will ask the user: Enter Data File to Work With. The user can open any and all drawings files in the world that consists of 6 lotto numbers per line. It's that logical!
3) The lottery software should create easily reports that aid in constructing strategies. A lottery strategy is simply a collection of filters, or restrictions that reduce the amount of lotto combinations (tickets) to be played. The lottery filters and building strategies are best presented here:
The lottery software should easily create a multitude of strategies. LotWon can build countless lottery strategies, mostly of the dynamic type. The first lottery strategy I offered on the Internet as a freebie was based on the skips or the gaps between hits for individual lotto numbers. The lottery numbers tend to repeat more often when the skip is under the FFG median.
That strategy demonstrated for the first time that randomness is ubiquitous and random events follow mathematical laws and formulas. That's when the naysayers turned against me in mouth-foaming rage! Some of them have had a vested interest; e.g. casino executives (including a casino chairman!) who attacked me in my own forum. Other naysayers are, actually, persons with the same interest as mine. But because I have discovered and they haven't, their jealousy turned into hatred, intense in some situations. Some of the naysayers still offer their own mockery lottery and gambling systems. They want me "down and out" in order to sell their garbage more easily, without fear of comparison. In fact, some of the attackers are pirates of my theories, even systems and software. They fear the consequences of piracy; therefore they prefer I was "down and out"!
4) The lottery software should easily and clearly offer back testing. That is, the program should generate reports that show how a particular lotto strategy would have fared in the past drawings. The strategy reports should present clearly how many times the strategy would have hit within a number of past lottery drawings.
5) Finally, the lottery or lotto software should generate correct combinations numbers to fill out the playing cards or grids. The lotto combinations should be clear and in easy-to-read format and saved as text files. This is a sine qua non step, but the vast majority of lottery software packages do not accomplish!
Undoubtedly, the best resource in lottery software (and many more categories, such as statistics and mathematics) can be accessed here:
Honestly, a book on the lottery topic would easily be larger than the Bible. And I am not talking about what they are referring to, in many situations, the Lottery Bible! By the Dog in Egypt I swear, and by its companion, the immortal Cat!
I'll only publish here a few images representing the most comprehensive and axiomatically-indubitably the best lottery software. There are many titles, most of them with the Bright in the filename (e.g. Bright6.exe for 6-number lotto games, virtually all such games worldwide). There is also the almost-all-in-one lottery software application known the world over as MDIEditor And Lotto WE.
The pick-3 and pick-4 lotteries are also covered in the super application MDIEditor And Lotto WE; Menu, Digit, then type of pick game, then type of pick lottery generation.
The jackpot lotto games are also covered in the super application MDIEditor And Lotto WE; Menu, Lotto, then type of jackpot game, including Powerball-type games (also Mega Millions, CA SuperLotto), and Euromillions.
Read Ion Saliu's book: Probability Theory, Live!
~ Founded on mathematical discoveries, also applied to creating strategy, systems in lottery software, lotto jackpot games.
Ion Saliu sings Federal Lottery on YouTube:
| Home | Search | New Writings | Odds, Generator | Contents | Forums | Sitemap |
