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Comment by leelin | Hacker News Reader

I've heard picking a lot of high numbers is a better strategy than picking pseudo-random numbers.

The logic is, sharing the prize greatly hurts the expected value (when N people win with the same numbers, they split the jackpot 1/N). Certain people like to play numbers corresponding to their birthday, anniversary, or other meaningful dates that range from 1 to 31. In the big US lotteries (Mega Millions and Powerball), the numbers range as high as 59, so picking a bunch of numbers in the 40s and 50s greatly reduces the chance of having to share the prize.

Another interesting story I've heard (no source sadly): one time the winning numbers were exactly the same as the "lucky numbers" printed on the back of a fortune cookie. An inordinate number of winners shared the prize, all Chinese food eaters who received the same fortune that week.

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Not exactly fortune cookie but there was a similar occurrence.

There was a set of numbers that appeared in one of the episodes for the TV show "Lost" and coincidentally, 4 of the numbers matched the numbers from the MegaMillions jackpot. Exactly 41,763 people matched those four numbers and each came off with $150 apiece.

source: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/06/entertainment/la-et-...

Picking some high numbers is good, but you have to be careful about picking all high numbers, since many other lottery players have also heard of this strategy. In a 6/46 game, of the 9.3 million combinations, only 5005 consist entirely of numbers higher than 31, while 736,281 are entirely "birthday" numbers. So if for every 150 people who play birthday numbers, there's one person who thinks they're outsmarting everyone and plays all high numbers, they're not actually improving their chances of picking an unpopular number.

Ideally you want to pick the set of numbers that's least likely to be shared with other players. However, the data used to derive any algorithm you use to determine that set of numbers will be publicly available.

That makes me wonder what's the best meta-algorithm to use when deciding on algorithms to use. Any good way to improve your number generating process is likely to be used by other people, ipso facto. And even if you try to derive a process that takes that into account, the more powerful your process is, the fewer the number of people it would take to moot your strategy.

And yet some processes--pulling numbers off of a fortune cookie--are genuinely horrible. Which seems like a mind-bendy paradox to me. There's this odd space between using a simple random number generator and using some kind of smart algorithm to do it that seems good. But the very fact that an algorithm exists to choose sone set of numbers seems to negate its value, so it seems almost beyond us to beat a random number generator.

I bet choosing randomly is going to come very close to being ideal. The amount of numbers that other people can buy up will be an insignificant.

Related examples here: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/lottery.asp (one of the rare "true" Snopes articles).

Briefly, on the first anniversary of 9/11, 911 was a winning three-digit lottery number in New York. However, 5631 people chose that number so the payout was comparatively small.

A spokesman for the Norwegian national lottery once said that "If the winning numbers should be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 one week, several thousand people would have to share the prize." Your prize then would be just enough to take a date to a nice restaurant.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerball#Fortune_cookie_payout

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