22 May '09 16:51>1 edit
Let's take the standard 6/49 lottery. (out of 49 numbers 6 are drawn randomly)
Assume each time you buy a ticket containing 6 numbers it costs you 1 dollar and you are going to spend 100 dollars on 100 tickets.
To maximize your winnings:
Are you better off to just let a computer randomly pick you 100 tickets with 6 numbers randomly chosen on each ticket,
or
are you better off picking a small subset of numbers (say 30) and rearranging them 100 different ways hoping that out of the 30, you pick the correct numbers that are chosen from the 49.
The payouts are as follows:
3 correct numbers: 10 dollars
4 correct numbers: 100 dollars
5 correct numbers: 100,000 dollars
6 correct numbers: 1 Million dollars
Assume each time you buy a ticket containing 6 numbers it costs you 1 dollar and you are going to spend 100 dollars on 100 tickets.
To maximize your winnings:
Are you better off to just let a computer randomly pick you 100 tickets with 6 numbers randomly chosen on each ticket,
or
are you better off picking a small subset of numbers (say 30) and rearranging them 100 different ways hoping that out of the 30, you pick the correct numbers that are chosen from the 49.
The payouts are as follows:
3 correct numbers: 10 dollars
4 correct numbers: 100 dollars
5 correct numbers: 100,000 dollars
6 correct numbers: 1 Million dollars