I buy SuperLotto every Wednesady from the 7-11 on Watt and Fruitridge in Sacramento. I buy two picks, one for me one for mom. I think she still plays in heaven. What does a jackpot look like in heaven?
I play SuperLotto because it’s better odds than PowerBall and MegaMillions. SuperLotto is made to give a pick a 1 in the-population-of-California chance of jackpot. So right now, that’s ~ 1 in 40MM shot. The jackpot starts over at $7MM after every jackpot and increases $1MM every drawing (2x a week) until the next jackpot. I’m good with a $7MM jackpot. It’s a 0.0000025% shot.
For comparison, last I looked, the odds for the big drawings were in the range of 1 in ~250MM. It’s a 0.0000004% shot.
The guy chatted me up a little bit as he handed me the ticket. He usually does if there aren’t many people waiting to pay. He says he wanted to know how some people were winning jackpots 10 times, 15 times, 19 times! He says he was really thinking about it, so he looked it up. He says there’s an app now, an AI app, that people are using to give them winning lotto numbers. He says the AI (he doesn’t remember the name, but he knows it’s green and white) is feeding people winning lotto numbers–that’s how people are winning so many times.
When he chats me up it’s usually about something he’s hearing from the other 7-11’s up here and down in LA. I imagine there’s a big email chain, or facebook groups, or maybe they actually meet up in person, or maybe that’s what some of them are always talking to when you think they might be talking to you but you realize they have earbuds in and it pushes you back into your bubble and you feel a little silly but then realize they probably feel a little silly too. They talk about what’s going on in 7-11 world. It makes me want to be a fly on the wall but that’s not really anything new.
I tell him that’s crazy. He says there’s a catch though. He looks at me serious and leans in a little. He says the catch is the app costs $190 to buy. He leans back and raises his eyebrows a little. I say man, I don’t know, that might be worth it, glancing at the ceiling as I check the math in my head.
He steps back and shrugs a little, not sure if his analysis is sealed up tight either.
Thanks man, I say, walking out. I’ll check it out.
Thanks brahtha, he says, good luck brahtha.
I walk out with no intention of looking up the app. I wonder what the statistics in an AI model have to do with picking numbers. In fact, I think to myself, that might be even further away than true randomness for lotto numbers that I am a firm believer in. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Something that seems like it abounds in everything we do is really difficult to create. It feels like magic. I’m always chasing it.
How would you make a lotto pick “look good”. I wonder because I am looking at my quick picks and I am very unhappy. They don’t look good to me. They don’t look lucky. Lots of repeat numbers, both picks with very similar numbers and patterns. I sigh because it seems lacking in magic and I can’t chase anymore right now because I have to get to work.
But now I’m wondering what an AI scraping all of the internet might be able to find. There’s no way any of the lottos would leave their probability machines open to an internet scraper right? Can’t be. But what if it is? Nah there’d be a lot more hubub. Someone would already be saying something. But this guy is saying something. There’s no way they’d have such poor security, right? But all the robots have is time–they don’t have to sleep or make dinner or wonder what will make them happy. They don’t feel sad. They just scrape. They just do exactly what we tell them to do all day and all night. Can I tell them to give me a winning lotto?
I just asked chatgpt and it said it conceptually simulated a random number generator. It won’t give me any more specifics. It can’t think. It can’t picture lotto balls in its “head”, so what does it mean? I ask for the math it used and it said it didn’t use any math. Something that is only math just told me it didn’t use any math. This is why I don’t use AI.
Bleh. There’s never a finish line. Well, there’s only one finish line. I like thinking more about the “seeds” that are used in random number generators. That’s the true randomness; that’s the true entropy. There’s nothing before that. And everything after that is just math. I like to know about the seeds. It reminds me of the walls of the universe.
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