A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
In fact Mandel was not able to calculate the odds of multiple winners. With publicity about an outsized jackpot, the general public is also expected to buy tickets in larger numbers, making it hard to estimate the expected winnings.
For that reason, I would not consider this to be gaming, or cheating the lottery. There was no guaranteed profit, and a moderate chance of large losses. So he took a big gamble, and was lucky to be the only winner in the end.
An interesting question is whether lotteries should publish the number of tickets sold when it implies expected winnings for every single ticket sold (as was the case in Mandel's lottery). On the one hand that should sell more tickets, but on the other hand it will deter some people from buying once the numbers stop being published...
It makes me think of the other lottery system where you bet numbers that are less likely than average to be bet by others so your chance of sharing the jackpot is less. Certainly there are some numbers that people over bet, and in some lotteries you could avoid some of them in principle by betting on numbers that couldn’t possibly be part of a date.
The upside for the scheme is limited though because a large majority of lottery tickets are sold as ‘quick picks’ where the machine picks a random number for you which is not only easy but a sound min max strategy.
The life insurance front sounds like a lot more work than either the algorithm or the ticket buying logistics! I wonder how much of the payouts ended up with lawyers.
Great advice if you want to be rich and unhappy. It is better to raise money and invest it wisely.
Isn't this a contradiction? Like only the lottery is allowed to cheat you?
Don't many State lotteries publish a "where your lottery dollar goes" breakdown - showing the percentages of ticket sales revenue going pay winners, going to support State programs, going to reseller commissions, and going to Lottery administrative overhead? With that breakdown, a history of the jackpot sizes, and some number-crunching, you should be able to get pretty good feel for ticket sales for each drawing.
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UI can't wait until we hear of the next level MIT geeks in vegas armed with AI glasses doing all the card counting for them, across many tables, decks, days, tourneys etc...
If there is one industry that should be afraid of AI nefariousness - it would be gambling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36766556#36768937
Like with trading systems, the thing that made it work here was not being smart about the maths. In fact anyone with high school maths would be able to work out when it was worth doing.
The thing here was the audacity to try to put together a business around getting it done. Things like getting investors, figuring out how to print the tickets, and delivering them.
However, even after the mental barrier is removed - Majority of us do not have the motivation to actualize our visions even after we know and believe that they are feasible.
I suspect that it takes a special human emotional/energy makeup to overcome enormous obstacles in pursuit of actualizing a vision. Thats what makes entrepreneurs/hustlers special.
It just comes down to being able to give it a try, mainly from having a combination of low failure cost and high success probability.
Much of the time the decision not to pursue the vision is the right one, because so much sacrifice is required. A lot of successful entrepreneurs have tragic personal lives because in the pursuit of their vision they sacrifice their families. For those of us who are perhaps older, with a lot of personal commitments, and perhaps are also economically comfortable, those sacrifices are too great.
Person saying it cannot be done, should not interrupt person doing it.
In other words: believe what you will, as long as you don't get in the way of someone who's busy doing what you think is impossible.
Sorry, but you've just described the underpinnings of our current winner-take-most societal-wide economic systems. Every day, more and more of our systems are rooted in luck. Being born to the right family, getting into a prestigious university, getting a good job, timing the housing market, investing in the stock market, starting a business... Everything is "take from the hopeful, give to the lucky".
But even if you are correct, lotteries and gambling have more of the essence of "take from the hopeful, give to the lucky" than any of the things you described.
Well, you got me there. Can't argue with that. Have a great Sunday.
Sounds a whole lot like the same with a different veneer....
- 25% hard work (required for most people)
- 75% luck (where you are born + how you were raised/educated + general luck)
It is called life/birth lottery for a reason.
I expect to lose 100% of what I go into a casino with. Those who think they can make a profit from it are profoundly stupid.
That said, there are still a lot of factors you cannot control (like the skill of your opponents, luck of the draw) which mean your approach is absolutely the wisest. Anyone who walks into a casino with money they can’t afford to lose is setting themselves up for failure (both at the table and potentially in life).
More to your point, the New York lottery long had a marketing line:
"All you need is a dollar and a dream."
My friend's riposte was: "We'll keep the dollar and you can keep the dream"
> This system worked best if a consortium of players bought tickets together and split the winnings, so, writes Pearson, Voltaire, de la Condamine and 11 compatriots teamed up and by June 1730, all had made a tidy sum.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voltaire-enlighten...
Surely they would give this Romanian guy an interview based on this answer! /S
Like to keep em entrepreneurs compliant....
New YC is traditional VC. Hustlers yes, hackers no.
Basically what I meant: a bit of maths, a lot of logistics. To me that qualifies!
But I guess this guy meant more like, some sort of "sophistication" like in the way that brute-force is an attack on SHA3, but no one has said publicly any better way to hack it!
Although for brute force to yield a successful hack, it must be sophisticated, by definition, otherwise it would be infeasible. And in this case, I think the guy qualifies, because he: 0) was successful, 1) reduced the brute force possibilities, and 2) rose to the logistical challenge of implementing them. Haha! :)
In Carlill the Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. claimed it had never intended a contract to arise, that the advertisements were just "puffery" and no reasonable person should have expected (as Carlill did) that if they do what it says in the advert and yet they get Influenza anyway (Carbolic Smoke Balls were a bogus cure for flu) they can claim the £100 stated (then a considerable sum of money) like it says in the advert. The judge said well, why does the advert explain that the company has £1000 in a bank account? If there's no intention to pay people money, why did you make a bank account, put money in it and tell them about it? No, this is clearly a contract, you offered, she accepted by performance, now you need to pay the nice lady.
But Pepsico clearly doesn't expect to give out fighter jets. It doesn't have any fighter jets, and the depicted scenario is ludicrous, which is exactly the opposite situation.
We can see that - at least after the initial hype - John Leonard saw this as a profile opportunity more than a serious attempt to get Pepsico to give him a jet, when he's like oh, this shouldn't be a Federal trial, this should be in front of a jury of my peers, and I define "My peers" to be "The Pepsi generation" that's clearly not serious any more.
That term links to an article in Romanian, which I can't read. But honestly, why's it supposed to be hard to list all possible combinations of 6 of the first 50 integers? Isn't that the same as listing all 6-digit integers in base 50?
[Edit] ...Yeah, you also have to filter-out all those integers with repeated digits, but that hardly needs a super-seekrit algorithm.
I'll usually buy a few tickets if it hits that point. Cheap fantasy.
For the recent billion dollar prize, a single person won.
The prizes get huge because when there's no winner, the prize rolls over to the next drawing.
However, as you cannot know in advance how many other players will play, or what numbers they will select, you cannot properly calculate an EV. Further, lottery players rarely play randomly. A winning combination made up exclusively of numbers less than 31 has a higher chance that someone else will have the same numbers (as many people use birthdays to pick the numbers they will play).
Say $2MM in tickets are sold, putting $1MM in the pot. And no-one wins. So next week, $2MM in tickets are sold, putting $1MM in the pot - which already contained $1MM from last week. Continue this over a few weeks.
After 5 weeks you have $5MM in the pot - and another $5MM in profits. On week 5, $2MM in tickets could buy $5MM in winnings, but that doesn't mean the scheme is negative. It just means this week's draw looks like a good deal.
States love lotteries because the house cannot lose - their share is taken before it goes in the pot, so the pot is never a liability.
what do you think about the format: [scalar] [si-prefix] [unit]
any idea how it came to prominence?
i guess i has something to do with distancing the field from natural sciences.
Companies will always put systems in place to protect systems but I'm sure there will always be loopholes!
He was born earlier than the Holocaust (especially the holocaust in Romania). Not to dismiss your point, but it's a disctinction very important to the people born duing the Holocaust.
> He described how the economic state and ethnic persecution motivated him to find ways to raise the funds for getting his family out of Romania.
As a matter of fact, Jewish people were the only people able to leave communist Romania when the borders were closed. Ana Pauker, the Romanian foreign minister (herself jewish) brokered a deal with Israel to allow 4000 jews/month to emigrate to Israel. Several other rounds of exit visas given by the Romanian government to jewish people emigrating to Israel (with oil equipement and hard cash received in return) led to basically an exodus of most jews in Romania. As an anecdote, my hometown was 80% jewish when my parents were born and two years ago, the last jewish person passed away at a littler over 100 years of age. I also have jewish ancenstry.. To post some numbers, there were ~400k jews in Romania at the end of WW2 and less than ~10k when the Iron Curtain fell. A large part of (what I consider to be) Romanian culture was lost during the cummunist quest of rewriting history and creating a 'pure' nation.
Just to put things into perspective. The communist rule in Romania was brutal and criminal even after the Red Army retreated and was under 100% Romanian leadership, and was especially brutal against ethnic minorities. Jewish people actually targeted during the anti-semitic Stalin purge which echoed in Romania as well, as local aparatchicks used this to purge the jews out of government (Anna Pauker is also a victim of that - not to defend her, she was also commie trash but a victim of antisemitism nontheless).
I don't blame the guy for wanting out.