Re:We need more goat sacrifices
by asdff on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @02:14PM
(#50457260)
A lot of lottery players will say use a birthday or something. Kind of interesting to think about this as deciding on pure random search or setting a seed and sampling that seed over the space. The behavior becomes much less about juju and maybe more an actual functional one with some biological utility, this ability to sample a defined input across a function set. The lottery aspect is almost blinding the point of why it might be useful to think like that.
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About (dear lord) 30 years ago when the national lottery came to the shores of Britain, my family had the neighbours over and there was some faux hand holding "seance/trance" make-pretend, with us spitting out numbers for the very first lottery ticket. We won a tenner!
Silliness of the highest order. I still have those numbers written down. They've got the same chance as any other set - but this set are _mine_. I might just be the only person alive who was there, now I reflect upon it. Huh
Re:We need more goat sacrifices
by quietbritishjim on Thursday November 12, 2026 @06:27AM
(#50465708)
> A lot of lottery players will say use a birthday or something.
Ironically, this makes the ticket less valuable.
You can't do anything to change the probability of winning, but you can change the probability of winning at the same time as other players (which affects the size of the winnings). By picking birthdays (i.e. forcing the numbers to be in the first 30 or so), your prize, if you do win, is likely to be smaller than a really random selection.