Broken Lotteries | Wired Science

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/broken-lotteries/

by kefeizhou • 15 years ago

24 12 15 years ago

joezydeco2• 15 years ago

So Srivastava could determine a winning-vs-losing ticket by looking at it. What lottery out there lets you examine and play with tickets before purchasing them? Are you allowed to return an unscratched ticket for a refund?

JacobAldridge• 15 years ago

The articles linked to in the OP (both of which have been discussed on HN before) provide a lot more detail.

To answer your specific question, Srivastava called the provincial lottery agency (iirc - it was Canadian) and asked 1) Would they send him a large number of tickets to use for a promotion / fundraiser, and 2) Would they "buy back" at face value any unused tickets. They said they would gladly do both - meaning he could examine before scratching, return unscratched, and also avoid lining up at the drug store to buy 10,000 tic-tac-toe tickets at once!

Edit: Previous discussions

Srivastava - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166555 Cash WinFall - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828122

joezydeco2• 15 years ago

And it wasn't suspicious when the lottery got back a large number of unsold tickets broken off the reel?

I give Srivastava credit for finding and exploiting the loophole, but they also seem to be easily closable. So the scratchoff is vulnerable. Future ones might be as well. A little common sense and better security could avoid another mishap.

praptak2• 15 years ago

"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math" just got more literal.

Udo• 15 years ago

In these cases, yes. Of course there's also the more direct saying that lotteries are a tax on stupid people. But I don't see it that way. It's supposed to be a contract between a lot of poor people allowing one or more of them a chance at a "rich" life. If anything, it's a tax on desperate people.

praptak2• 15 years ago

Yes, (a (non-broken) lottery might be a rational choice even for someone understanding the math behind it.

If you only have $20k and need $0.5M for an urgent life saving operation, then the expected payoff for not playing is -$20k (death) and it's -$20k+(some non-negative value representing the win) for spending all of your money on tickets.

spaetzel• 15 years ago

Looked more into Cash WinFall, looks like they are trying to fix the lottery and are blocking gamblers from buying more than $5000 of tickets per day per terminal: http://www.masslottery.com/about/news.html

albedoa2• 15 years ago

The article from the old discussion mentioned that lottery merchants were violating a number of rules by letting these high-rolling customers run the ticket machines, etc. I wonder how they'll enforce this new rule if they had trouble enforcing the rest of them.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828122

geon• 15 years ago

I thought the winning tickets would be decided first, then filled with winning/losing numbers and symbols, specifically to avoid situations like this.

sesqu• 15 years ago

No, that's exactly what lead to these situations. If you choose the winning tickets first, the player may have access to observed numbers of winners or your potential filler algorithm. That information must be accounted for by the design.

Broken Lotteries | Wired Science

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