eihli

Now show me a writeup that explains how the brain works so I can understand why the brain does those things.

> We know how these machines work, it's not mysterious, there's nothing "extra" happening.

It sounds like you're saying "We don't know how brains work, they're mysterious, there's something 'extra' happening", and using that as justification for why you're saying a computer, an AI, can't "understand".

I think most people on Hackernews now who would use the phrase "my AI worked overnight and hypothesized, compared, etc..." already know how an LLM works, and still chooses to use those words. So the issue isn't that they don't understand. It's that they understand and still use those words. So the disagreement is somewhere else.

You now have 2̶ 1 remaining My4th Lights.

Nothing stopping someone from buying all the remaining tickets. But if you do the math, I think you'll find it's still not worth it. How fast can you scratch/verify tickets? If you take the lump sum, you get something like 60% of the grand prize. If you take the annuity, it pays out over 20-40 years. Taxes will take out another chunk.

But everyone's situation is different. If you already have losses that could be tax-deducted from the win, that would help you. If you could monetize the process by selling your story or gaining youtube fame, that would help. Some youtuber did buy $1,000,000 worth of tickets without any particular strategy and presumably made profit from the youtube side of his business. As expected, he got back ~70% so it only cost him ~$300k + production costs.

Actually that other explanation is for fractional tickets in other locations of the database, like prizes remaining.

Specifically in `num_tx_initial` it might be because they don't report the number of tickets printed. But if they print the odds of a win and numbers of winners available, then you can estimate how many non-winners there are and thus how many printed tickets there are.

Some states only publish claim numbers for prizes over a certain amount. For prizes below that amount, I estimate using the % claimed of all published prizes.

If 25% of the prizes greater than $30 have been claimed, then I assume 25% of the prizes lesser than $30 have been claimed. Everything in the low numbers has large enough data pools for it to average out accurately. It's not until you get to the $600+ prize level where things would be really inaccurate.

You'll also note there's usually a lag for prizes $600+.

When you look at aggregates across states, you might see something like 25% of prizes below $600 have been claimed but only 19% of prizes above $600 have been claimed. I figure that's because $600+ has to be claimed at lottery headquarters and go on taxes. So people might delay, try to hide the money from their spouse, wait for tax reasons, the headquarters has to manually process it rather than the automated machine at a retail outlet, whatever...

If you do something cool with it, let me know at [email protected].

Employees could really game the system. On average there's 1 "big" prize (outside the GLEP prizes) every 4 packs. Any time you see a pack go from start to ~5 remaining without a big prize, buy every remaining ticket.

There's also guaranteed restrictions on the maximum number of losers in a row. So if you see ~6+ (depends on ticket) losers in a row, then buy the next few until you win. I've run simulations on those distributions and it's profitable. But it's a situation that only an employee could take advantage of. And it probably comes up rarely.

Had an idea when I saw one of these on a cruise ship.

Every time we spent time within eyesight of the machine, I timed it and counted how many plays went in. After a couple of days, I had something resembling an average number of plays per hour. The machine was one where the prizes were visible, so you could tell how many had been won.

Now I had a bound on the number of plays per prize.

Estimate number of plays based on amount of time passed. Check if prize has been claimed. If not, it's due.

You don't have to be too accurate with your numbers. Just get within ~50% to beat the vig.

Can you please share how you got the 2^40 number? I've been trying to think of how to figure out the odds of these.

Odds of 4 hex 8's in a row given a 4 digit string is (1/16)^4.

Odds of 4 hex 8's in a row given a 5 digit string is number of ways to arrange 8s in the first 4 digits (1) times 16 possible 5th digits plus number of ways to arrange 8s in the last 4 digits (1) times 16 possible 1st digits, all divided by the number of possible arrangements (16^5)

So 8888X or X8888 is (2 * 16) / (16^5)?

And then 8888XX or X8888X or XX8888 is...

(16^2 + 16^2 + 16^2) / (16^6) ???