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Comment by Pick-A-Hill2019 | Hacker News Reader

Pick-A-Hill2019·

I suspect this to be a genuine random event rather than a 'fix'. If you were able to set the numbers and let your stooge know what the winning numbers were going to be...

Why on earth would you pick numbers that were certain to draw attention?

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So to prevent attention, choose “non-obvious” sequences. But then those end up being investigated more than “obvious” ones like this. So you would actually want to choose “obvious” ones to avoid suspicion!

There’s a paradox related to this train of thought: the “unexpected hanging paradox.”[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

Ah yes, reverse psychology. I considered that and then thought about triple reverse psychology and ended up with it's Turtles All the Way Down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_psychology

> Why on earth would you pick numbers that were certain to draw attention?

Not only that, but sequences like this are significantly more likely to have many winners (assuming the lottery allows ticket purchasers to select their own numbers).

What if you fixed the lottery with a PRNG where if you knew the IV then you would know the output, but then someone forgot to set the IV or some other human error, leading to the PRNG simply incrementing numbers from 5?

could have been a hacker/whistleblower exposing an existing flaw in a plausibly deniable manner for his own safety

edit: wait for morse code S-O-S :)

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