I don't think probability is communicative, is it?
EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.
I don't think probability is communicative, is it?
EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.
Playing 10,000 times in 1 drawing gives you the probability of winning the jackpot:
0.00003422297813=10000/292201338
Playing 10,000 times in 10,000 drawings gives you the probability of winning the jackpot:
0.00003422239258=1-((292201338-1)/292201338)^10000
The difference gets more significant if you play more. For 10 million plays its:
.0342 vs .0336
If you play only 100 times the probability of a jackpot is the same to 7 significant digits.
-edit I put it on $1M and let it run. I hit the 5 numbers, $1M prize, at some point around $150k spent.
It approaches 1.0 as you buy more tickets, but even at $800m, the lump sum payout of $491m is still lower than the cost of buying all possible $2 tickets ($584m).
And even if you could buy all tickets you still might have to split the winnings...
You also have to subtract taxes from the payout, which also eats into the payout. I would expect it would be 30% or higher, depending on how much you spend on a tax lawyer (which, of course, cuts into the payout as well).
The only[1] way to win is to not play.
[1] Odds are 292,201,338 to 1 of winning by not playing.
For an extreme example, consider a lottery with only one number, selected from 1 to 2, costing $1 per ticket, with a $2 jackpot.
Buy 2 tickets at once, you lose $2 on tickets, and you get $2 back. Expected net return, $0 (with probability 100%).
Buy 1 ticket per draw for 2 draws, and you have a 1/4 chance of winning nothing (net -$2), a 1/4 chance of winning both jackpots (net +$2), and a 2/4 chance of winning one and losing one (net $0). Same expected value.
Of course, in a real lottery, usually[0] the expected value is negative. So what's happening is like anti-insurance. In both cases your expected value is negative, but you pay the insurance company money to lower your variance, and you pay the lottery money to raise your variance.
[0] Usually? Well, in theory with a cumulative jackpot the jackpot might get high enough to make the expected value positive... except that usually as the jackpot rises, the number of players rises too, such that you have to take into account the possibility of having the split the jackpot, which of course would cut your take in half, or worse.
They ask you to comment if you won. Their program guarantees you lose when it terminates -- even if you hit the 1:292,000,000 odds.
It is not mathematically provable that a random walk of finite length will eventually touch 0. Proof by counterexample: the set of every walk of length 1 where you win the jackpot on your first try.
However, consider an infinite random walk. You can fix the first n values of the walk to win the jackpot as much as you want, but as the random walk progresses toward infinity, it is highly probable that you will be on a random walk that tends toward negative infinity. (You might have to play a lot; $437 million of $3 tickets would probably be enough tickets to play powerball for a few lifetimes.)
I'm not doing this in reality (I spent $2 for a pool, woo), but I'm curious to see it simulated.