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nh3simman
02-04-2007, 07:52 PM
Last week our national lottery announced 9 winners.

:confused: - 9 people guessed all 6 numbers correctly - :confused:

The odds of winning are about 1/15million. In a country with 40 million people, 9 winners is pretty much impossible.

This week, the lottery board has been suspended. Hands in the till problems maybe?


In the same vein, here is a puzzle for you...

You ask someone to flip a coin 200 times and record the results. When you get the results, you are not sure if they were faked.

Is there a way for you to prove if the results are genuine?
frank
02-04-2007, 08:00 PM
In the same vein, here is a puzzle for you...

You ask someone to flip a coin 200 times and record the results. When you get the results, you are not sure if they were faked.

Is there a way for you to prove if the results are genuine?

Heads they are Genuine
Tails they are Faked ;) :p
nh3simman
02-04-2007, 08:01 PM
I forgot to mention, Frank has to wait at least 1 day before giving the answer.
nh3simman
04-04-2007, 04:20 AM
Is there a way for you to prove if the results are genuine?

The answer is YES there is a way.
walden
04-04-2007, 07:38 AM
I'm not sure if this is the answer but if you flip a genuine coin 199 times and each time it lands heads-up: the chances of it landing heads-up on the 200th flip is exactly the same as the when the coin was first flipped - 1 in 2.
nh3simman
04-04-2007, 10:46 AM
I'm not sure if this is the answer but if you flip a genuine coin 199 times and each time it lands heads-up: the chances of it landing heads-up on the 200th flip is exactly the same as the when the coin was first flipped - 1 in 2.

True, but that is just basic probability theory. The history cannot determine the outcome of the next random event.

But if someone shows you a record of his coin tosses and you see 199 heads, then you will know that something was wrong.

So, if someone shows you, what looks like a random, history of coin tosses, can you determine if they are genuine?

That is the question.

It turns out that there is an effect that has been called Benford's law. This states that in the course of flipping a coin 200 times, the probability is very high that heads will come up 6 times or more in succession.

If this was not evident, then you could say with a lot of certainty that the coin tosses were faked.
NoNickName
04-04-2007, 12:20 PM
The fact the 9 people got the right 6 numbers altogether at once leads me to think that the 6 numbers are not chosen random, but they are linked to some mathematical or deterministic equation.
It also happened in Italy a couple of years ago, and the six numbers were all multiple of 5.
nh3simman
04-04-2007, 12:45 PM
The fact the 9 people got the right 6 numbers altogether at once leads me to think that the 6 numbers are not chosen random, but they are linked to some mathematical or deterministic equation.
It also happened in Italy a couple of years ago, and the six numbers were all multiple of 5.

I don't know NoNickName, it seems to me that in the case of this lottery, the winning numbers were put on tickets after the draw.