A Little Weird » Blog Archive » Randomness Doesn’t Exist - Part 1

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May 19th, 2007 by Sean Randomness Doesn’t Exist - Part 1

I will explain my ideas on why I believe randomness doesn’t truly exist. I believe I can win the lottery using these ideas.

The first thing to understand is what society’s current beliefs are about randomness.

One of the first things you might think about, is that when you play video games on your computer, there is obviously some random stuff going on. Sometimes an enemy turns left, sometimes he turns right - completely random. You might even know some things about programming, and know of functions to call when you want a random number.

All these random numbers on computers aren’t truly random though - they are pseudo-random numbers. What that means is that usually some number is taken from the outside world - for example, the time it takes you to click on the “New Game” button in milliseconds - or the time of day you run the program in milliseconds - and that number is treated as the “seed”. From this seed number, the computer can generate a sequence of numbers that appear to be random. All it does is perform some math on the seed number, and spit out the result for you. Then change the seed number (according to a formula), so the next time you want a random number, it has a new result.

You don’t have to understand the exact formulas. If you’re curious you can do some more research on pseudo-random numbers, and random number generation. It’s a large field in computer science. The important part to understand is that these “random” numbers on computers aren’t actually random. They are calculated from some seed, based on formulas. Not random.

So randomness doesn’t exist on a computer. But surely randomness exists in reality?! You might argue, for example, what about flipping a coin? What about rolling dice? These events are truly random.

Well, on the surface they sure do seem like it. After all - how many of us can predict 100 dice rolls in a row? No one. So it does seem like that is a random system. However, there is a problem.

The problem comes in when we research how many people have won the lottery twice. Google, Video, Couple, Family, PA, NY Deli, etc, etc…

Now of course there are skeptics on the issue, claiming that with so many people playing, surely there will be some people who win twice. For those with some common sense, reading the skeptic side of things is actually pretty hilarious - they claim: “the odds of someone winning the lottery twice to be something like 1 in 30 for a four month period and better than even odds over a seven year period. Why? Because players don’t buy one ticket for each of two lotteries, they buy multiple tickets every week” - wow. Then how come everyone doesn’t win twice? All they have to do is play 40 times ;-). An absolutely ridiculous article, especially for those that understand statistics and probability at a high-school level.

The truth is that our current understanding of reality can NOT explain how people win the lottery twice.

So, we have to do what’s right. We have to be honest with ourselves. Probability and statistics are models for reality. The models work pretty good most of the time, but when we look at people who win the lottery twice, we notice that our model is incorrect. If our model is mostly correct, but has some incorrect moments, then what do we do? Modify the model. Clearly our model isn’t completely accurate. So we modify it. We DO NOT spatter off nonsense to try and convince ourselves that our model must be correct, and that reality is just being rude for not following our laws. We take an honest and humble look at it and say: Well gee, we’re a little bit off, how can we make a more accurate model?

Think about it. Study probability and statistics a little bit. Try to digest the odds of someone winning twice. In this article we’re told the odds are 419 million to one. That would mean the winner would have to play the lottery every minute - for 796 years - to accomplish this using our current model. Now you see how impossible this really is with our current model.

Think about it. I’ll post more on it later.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Lottery, Philosophy, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 20 Responses to “Randomness Doesn’t Exist - Part 1”

1. delimew Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 10:38 am

   to me, what it sounds like is this: what a computer randomly does isn’t really random, it just seems like it to those of us who don’t understand the seed/formula.

   in the same way, what reality randomly does isn’t really random, it just seems random cause we don’t understand the… whatever it is thats behind it.

   of course, thats just my way of looking it, and I’m definitely interested on what other people make of this whole thing. (though I’m sure that the odds say none of us will ever manage to get it right :P)

2. Gumby Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 10:59 am

   You mean the micro- PK games dont work? I do good at those too..

3. Derg4 Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 11:17 am

   Those games do work, I’ve done quite a few with a deck of cards myself (and know how to find out how likely it is that it happens like that). No, the micro-PK games DO work BECAUSE reality isn’t random, therefore you can warp the results to your own needs? Maybe it’s not the reality that’s random, it’s people’s collective thoughts about how it must be random that makes it “random”. Heck, I don’t know what I’m getting into, haha. I’m gonna stop typing before my head explodes.

4. Dash Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 1:29 pm

   i heard of a group of people.. i want to say “numerologists” (not sure if thats the right group though) that believe that everything is based off a number, emotions, thought processes, evolution , density.
   and when an outside number connects with a internal number.. lets say “music” and “emotion” that music has a number that either agrees or disagrees with your emotions number: main cause : you either like or dislike the music.

   O_O wow.. i like to think the world would be that complex yet that simple..

5. Dreaming to Infinity Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 2:48 pm

   Randomness Doesn’t Exist…?…

   I saw a post over on A Little Weird about randomness. Sean’s view is that it doesn’t exist, and that people winning the lottery twice proves it. “we’re told the odds are 419 million to one. That would mean the winner would have to …

6. hotfoot982 Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

   Nice article.
   I am still putting thought into this and what randomness really is.

   Im looking forward to see a part 2 article.

   - hotfoot982

7. NeoPsychic Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 8:32 pm

   Just shut up and win the lottery already and stop stalling *_^

8. Spieta Says:
   May 20th, 2007 at 4:01 am

   Change.. Spare some change?

9. Oneta Says:
   May 20th, 2007 at 4:29 am

   “Lehigh University professor Bob Storer placed the odds of winning twice at 419 million-to-1, if 100 tickets are played.”

   I don’t understand the logic here. The odds of winning twice would be the same as the odds of winning once, so there is no need of a figure for “odds of winning twice” just know that you have the same chance everytime you play. Now I calculated it and basically you have 500 million to one chance that you will win if you buy one ticket in a lottery which consists of 60 numbers on the tally sheet, and dealt in combinations of 6 numbers. Now if you got 100 tickets, just divide the chances buy 100 and you would have a 5 million to one chance of winning. Either way it would not be in the hundreds of millions. Just the same as if you got 500 million people to play and divided 500 mill by 500 million tickets, then the group of people as a whole would be guaranteed a 1 in 1 chance of winning. So either I did my math wrong or the article writer did their math wrong.

10. Sean Says:
    May 20th, 2007 at 9:48 am

    Here you go, Oneta:

    http://psipog.net/art-understanding-probability.html

11. GoldNexus Says:
    May 20th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    I think you guys misunderstood this part, “the odds of someone winning the lottery twice to be something like 1 in 30 for a four month period and better than even odds over a seven year period”.

    The key word here is ’someone’. Those are the odds that, out of MILLIONS of people that consistantly play the lottery, the odds that any random one of them will win twice is 1 in 30 over a four month period. Of course the odds of any specific person doing it are wildly small, but out of all those people, it’s bound to happen to someone.

    Just like, for the non-creationist people, what are the odds that the planet we happen to live on would have just the right combination of temperature, atmosphere, gravity, etc. Obviously these odds are not very good, we’ve yet to find anywhere else with these characteristics. But that doesn’t matter because if it didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be able to think about it. There may be a billion places not like here, but we are the lucky ones. Similarly, there are millions of people that never win, but there’s a few that happen to win more than once.

    Large numbers are really an interesting thing. Some other things to think about are car accidents. What are the odds that any specific time you go driving, you’ll crash. Pretty low right? Yet millions of people get into car accidents, some get into more than one, and some do it quite often. Of course this isn’t entirely the same because part of it is driving skill, but same idea.

    The bottom line is, if our understanding of randomness, probability, and large numbers did not work, then Lottories and those amazingly rich insurance companies would not be able to function. Insurance companies base their whole business model on calclulations based on these laws.

    Computer psuedo-random numbers are a different story. No, those are indeed not random, but that’s because computers are entirely determanistic. All things being said, they put on a pretty good illusion.

12. Oneta Says:
    May 20th, 2007 at 4:17 pm

    I did miscalculate last night, and it was only 50 million to one if you buy one ticket. I just don’t agree with their way of presenting probability of winning. Sure these are “laws” of probability people have made up, but who says probability even applies to the lottery. The lottery could be fixed and you guys are making too much out of it, then what!?

13. Oneta Says:
    May 20th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    OH…and I meant to say I agree with Goldnexus when he said this

    “The key word here is ’someone’. Those are the odds that, out of MILLIONS of people that consistantly play the lottery, the odds that any random one of them will win twice is 1 in 30 over a four month period. Of course the odds of any specific person doing it are wildly small, but out of all those people, it’s bound to happen to someone.”

    And that is basically the idea I was presenting in my first post about how each ticket holds a 50(recalculated) million to one chance of being a winner. Buy more, it goes down. Calculated as a group of tickets between a group of people, it goes down more. But buy one single ticket and the odds are still going to be 50 million to one.

14. Sean Says:
    May 20th, 2007 at 10:21 pm

    GoldNexus:
    Not sure where you’re getting your numbers from. It sounds like you’re blindly accepting this “1 in 30″ idea. The problem is that we can actually do the calculation.

    http://tinyurl.com/3coxmv

    “The odds of winning just once are 1.44 million-to-1, according to state lottery officials. The odds of winning twice vary, depending on how many tickets are scratched. Lehigh University professor Bob Storer placed the odds of winning twice at 419 million-to-1, if 100 tickets are played.”

    The calculation is correct, but it’s a pain in the ass to do, because they are large numbers. The formula we use will be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution , which is:

    Combination(100, 2) * (1 / 1440000) ^ 2 * (1439999 / 1440000) ^ 98

    Calculate that out. It’s about 1 in 419 million :-P.

    That means we need 419 million people to buy 100 tickets. And one of them will win twice. There are 12 million people in Pennsylvania. So we would need each person in PA to buy 3491 tickets. At $20 each.

    It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s very easy to not do the calculation and say, “Yeah I suppose a person winning twice is bound to happen”. No, it’s not bound to happen. Do the calculation.

15. Snarky McJigg Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 12:24 am

    I think the perfact example to explain the computer seed, would be to simply open up solitare on your computer and hold the F2 key. It starts a new game but you’ll notice the cards only change every second.

16. Oneta Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 1:09 am

    http://icarus.mcmaster.ca/fred/Lotto/finance1110496.html
    Click full story for more story, obviously.

17. delimew Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 2:37 am

    “I don’t understand the logic here. The odds of winning twice would be the same as the odds of winning once, so there is no need of a figure for “odds of winning twice””

    I understand where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure thats right.

    think of it this way, if I flip a coin there’s a 1/2 chance of it being heads. fair enough. but if I flipped 2 coins, the chance of both being heads is only 1/4. of course, if I flipped a coin and got heads, then the chance of the other also being heads is 1/2.

    in the same way, the chance of winning the lottery twice is not the same as winning it once. of course, if you did win once, then the chance of winning it again is the same as winning it once. but, when you consider that most people don’t even win once…

    another point, they say that the odds of winning twice are something like 1 in 30 for a four month period, that would mean that someone would be expected to win twice every 10 years. yet, over 10 years, most people still haven’t won even once. am I the only one who sees that that doesn’t fit?

    but, there is yet another way to think of it (note: my ability with maths and statistics is somewhat limited. so I’m really sorry if I totally screwed something up here >.> ). the odds of winning once are 1.44 million-to-1. now, I don’t know how many different people win the lottery. but, over 10 years, I’d imagine it would only be about 500 people (please correct me if you have a better number. mines kinda just a guess) I’ll be very nice and say that those 500~ people combined buy a total of 1000 tickets per lottery (since, as someone said, some of those people will buy more than one ticket).
    so, come next lottery, the chance of the winner being someone that also won in the last 10 years is about 1.44 million-to-1000 (1.4 thousand-to-1). now, this may sound more friendly, but it means that it would take about 1.4 thousand lotteries before someone could be expected to win twice. I don’t know how this lottery works, but assuming there is one winner a week, it would take about 27 years for someone to be expected to win twice. that actually sounds somewhat possible…
    but of course, knowing me, I probably did make some huge mistake somewhere. and my brains starting to hurt too much for me double check some of this working and writing >.

18. GoldNexus Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 2:49 am

    Okay, some things..

    First of all, I did not realize this was a scratch ticket. I thought it was the regular lotto where you have to match the numbers. Obviously scratch cards are a bit different because who knows how they’re distributed? So 2 winning tickets happened to go to this woman’s town. That increases the odds of her winning significantly. But, disregarding that…

    “That means we need 419 million people to buy 100 tickets.”

    No, it doesn’t. To get those 1/419 million odds, you’d need one person to buy 100 tickets, or 10 people to buy 10 each, 100 people to buy one each, etc.

19. delimew Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 5:17 am

    or darn you’re right. it was a scratch card. there goes most of my post wasted…

20. A Little Weird » Blog Archive » Randomness Doesn’t Exist - Part 2 Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 11:50 am

    […] reality bizarres the standard « Randomness Doesn’t Exist - Part 1 […]

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