Predicting the lottery with a random number generator.

[pamgb1963]

I wonder if a random number generator can solve the problem of predicting the lottery. Imagine if a random number generator must target all the past draws, one by one (from the very first one till the last, in succession) and for each attempt it shows how many tries it had made. Something like that:

Attempting to predict draw #0001 (16, 29, 32, 36, 41 + 07, 09) - done with 234000 tries.
Attempting to predict draw #0002 (07, 13, 39, 47, 50 + 02, 05) - done with 259000 tries.
...
Attempting to predict draw #1184 (01, 06, 13, 15, 16 + 06,10) - done with 397000 tries.

It would be interesting to know how many tries in average it took to predict each one of the past draws.



Paulo Barbosa

[Rabbit]

It's not a prediction if it's random... You're basically asking what are the odds of two separate independent random draws match each other. The answer to that is the same as the odds of winning the lottery with a chosen sequence.