Scratchies Are Not Random
That night, however, he realized that the voice was right: The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.
Consequently a Canadian statistician informed the lottery companies, but they ignored him, even though he proved to them their games were seriously flawed. Read more at Wired.
Meanwhile a woman with a PhD in statistics seems to have been taking advantage of similar flaws in the USA (and good on her!):
First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot.
The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years.
Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question.
First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics.