Validation of a get rich quick scheme using lottery tickets

[SciameriKen]

Greetings all!


I am happy to announce my latest experiment:

Validation of methodology for financial enrichment based on lottery ticket complexity

Upon realizing there are tons of these scratch off games and many are very confusing, I figure the likelihood of someone accidentally throwing away a winner has to be somewhat high - so I dumpster dived for science!

Check out the results here: http://www.scientificameriken.com/cover_jun16.asp

[zetreque]

I saw, I think a documentary, on lotteries a while back. It relieved that this is a complex industry and there were people finding loop holes. They would drive around the country buying up state lottery tickets and making a killing through certain loopholes. States are so full of bureaucracy that some of these loopholes still might not be fixed and go easily unnoticed. Wish I could remember where I saw it.

[zetreque]

Figure 3. Although this ticket utilizes the classic, "uncover 3 of the same prize to win that prize", it is suspected that this individual just did not care redeem the ticket to gain a measly "Take 5" quick pick ticket.

makes me wonder the wealth status of the players. Perhaps there are players of these lottos that are only in it for the big wins. The psychology behind the players is worth investigating. Why play if you already have money? Is there addiction involved? At what value is the monetary gain worth it to different people?

Figure 5. Scientific AmeriKen can only surmise the player was blind.

Is it possible the ticket was already redeemed and the cashier made the mistake to do it a second time?

PS: "Even though these eventually ended up as losers, the feasibility of this strategy for financial enrichment is more or less proven."

I know people who have a problem with the word "proven" in science, they get really upset and say "nothing is ever proven, but there is evidence for". :) I don't know what terminology is best though. It would be cool to have levels of how much evidence there are for something in the English language.

[neuro]

It would be cool to have levels of how much evidence there are for something in the English language.

The levels actually are there: the parameter is called likelihood.

However, as it is the case for "p" in significance computation, likelihood sadly behaves the other way around: it does not tell how likely your hypothesis is, given the results, but rather how likely it was to observe what you observed if your hypothesis was true (too bad, if you have a lot of data the likelihood usually has pretty small values, such as 10^-12 or so).

So, likelihood can only be used comparatively, to tell by how much more likely a hypothesis is than another.
Still if you can split the problem into two complementary hypotheses (either one is true and the other false, or vice versa), then the computation of the likelihood will give you the "level" you are looking for.

[zetreque]

Thanks neuro,

I had in mind something for adding to the spectrum of theory or law. Like obviously gravity is pretty well known so we call it a law. Then we have scientific theories which can seem ambiguous, but are there more terms for a concept based on how much evidence there are for it? Is likelihood smaller scales under a theory?

[neuro]

Well, Zetreque, I believe you hit on a theoretically hard point.
There is no way to estimate what is the likelihood of a theory.
You can observe two million white swans. That make the theory that swans are white pretty likely, but does not give in any way a likelihood or probability of the law that "ALL" swans are white...

In a sense, a theory can be considered a law if it has been tested on the whole of its domain. This is why scientific experiments must be designed to disprove a theory. If you try in all possible ways (provided you can...) and fail, then you will have explored the whole domain of the theory and can be fully confident on it.

When we consider a theory to be "proven" (a "law") that means that as far as we can figure out there are no aspects that have not been subjected to failed attempts at disproving.

(I am only telling it the way I see it: I have no authority to suggest that what I said here has any normative value)

[zetreque]

I guess it's just going to be calculating statistics in the end.