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PERSONAL PROJECTS
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To wind away all those loose hours between lectures, I tend to practice my programming skills by producing personal projects. Last year I worked on a Matrix program in Fortran77 (which failed) and a calendar program in Ada (which I bored half my friends to death with).
This year I've been working on a Lottery program, a remake of the Matrix program and conversions of these programs to javascript.
The lottery program works by firstly rating pairs of balls. Using data from previous draws, a special rating function calculates if two balls have appeared together more often
than what we would expect for the norm.
Having done this, it then goes on to combine these pairs to
form combinations of 3,4,5 or 6 balls.
The history and derivation of this rating procedure is documented here.
The whole idea of this is to find balls that should be accompany each other on the same line. For instance, one weekend I correctly chose the numbers 48,35,43 and 7, but since I only had 2 of these on any one line, I won nothing.
One thing to be made clear is that good combinations indicate balls that have come out together often in the past, not necessarily in future draws and the program can in no way predict when these numbers are going to appear - we leave those predictions to Mystic Meg.
As a result, these numbers are meant for winning the smaller prizes and since no smaller prize is shared there is no need to worry about the statistical expectancy.
You can take a more in-depth look on the lottery page.
There are many sites with information on the national lottery, I collected all my data from The UK national lottery site and you can contact the national lottery site for details on how to play. There are many other lottery sites dedicated to lotteries all over the world.
If you play the lottery you may want to read my definition of luck.
