THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 18, 1996 TAG: 9609170007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 88 lines
The office manager said a caller was on the line. She had recommended that he talk to the newsroom but he didn't want to do that. Would I speak to him?
I would. Journalists tend to speak to everybody. Or should. Considering the low regard in which journalists are held, we are lucky that anyone speaks to us.
My desk telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and identified myself.
The caller, male, identified himself as a physician.
How could I help?
The doctor said he was looking at his Lotto tickets - five Easy Pick sets of six numbers each. Easy Pick numbers are randomly chosen by a computer.
The doctor complained that some of the five sets of numbers contained numbers from other sets. He thought the set should be unique. Three of the five sets of numbers had the number 8. Two sets had the number 5.
The doctor thought this scandalous. This happened to him whenever he bought tickets. When the individual numbers appeared on two or more tickets, he figured the Virginia Lottery was cheating him. Why? Because the winning Lotto ticket might have no 8, and so two of the five tickets he bought would have been worthless from the get-go. He thought 8 should have appeared in only one six-number sequence. The same with the 5. It should have appeared on only one ticket, not two tickets. He concluded that if what was happening to him was also happening to many other Lotto players, the Virginia Lottery was cheating everybody. Wouldn't that make a good news story? Wouldn't that be something the newspaper would want to look into?
Possibly, I said. But I also said I thought the odds might be very good that 8 or 5 or 2 or any other number from 1 through 44 - the numbers used in the Lotto game - will show up more than once when players buy more than one Lotto ticket per drawing. I thought that this might be true even if the player bought a single ticket at five different outlets instead of five at one outlet. But I added that I had no idea what the odds that numbers will recur in five different six-number sets because I am not a mathematician. I suggested that the mathematicians at the Virginia Lottery headquarters in Richmond would know and that my caller should perhaps put the question to them.
The question ought to interest the newspaper, the caller insisted, but it seemed not to. Couldn't I assign someone on my staff to look into the matter?
Well, not exactly. I explained that he was talking to my staff. I told him that I am in the editorial department and that I don't command a staff.
The caller laughed. But he was unhappy and out of patience. The newspaper ought to be interested.
I agreed that the question was of some interest. It's the kind of question that mathematician John Allen Paulos takes up in his delightful collection of short pieces titled Innumeracy. ``Innumeracy'' is the equivalent of ``illiteracy.'' Illiterates lack knowledge of reading and writing. Innumerates lack scientific, especially mathematical, knowledge.
I am innumerate. I told the caller that before I could judge whether the Virginia Lottery might be cheating Lotto players - a subject that surely would interest readers - I would have to learn from a mathematician what would be the likelihood of a specific number's appearing more than once on five tickets purchased by a single player.
The caller hung up, dissatisfied. I telephoned Paula Otto, the Virginia Lottery's director of public affairs, and recounted the essence of my conversation with the doctor. Could the Virginia Lottery mathematicians answer the question?
Otto was confident they could. The answer arrived next day, along with documenting calculations, a reference to mathematicians' philosophical arguments over what is truly ``random,'' and a description - doubtless crystal clear to the numerate - of the extensively tested and retested algorithm used by the Virginia Lottery to generate random numbers.
An abridged dictionary defines ``random'' as ``being or relating to a set or to an element of a set each of whose elements has equal probability of occurrence.''
The Virginia Lottery mathematicians' short answer to the question posed by the doctor is: ``If a player purchases one Lotto ticket for $5 with 5 different Easy Pick wagers, the odds that all 30 numbers will be unique are 1 in 111,225. Conversely, there is a 99.9991 percent chance that at least 2 of the numbers on that 5-panel ticket will be the same.'' There is a xxxxxxx chance that at least 3 of the numbers on a 5-panel ticket will be the same. And so on.
Would that the odds for winning the Virginia Lottery's Lotto were 1/100th as favorable as the odds that a number will repeat itself on a 5-panel ticket. The chance that any Lotto ticket you buy will win is 1 in 7 million.
So the odds of winning Lotto are between slimmest and slimmer than that. As a Berlin guide noted many years ago to a busload of passengers rolling past a Lotto-ticket-sales kiosk in West Berlin, ``Lotto ist a very gute vay uff getting nozzing for somezing.''
Luck - good and bad - is a fact of life. To play the lottery is almost surely to lose. But there is this certainty: You can't win if you don't play. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB