Are Lottery Balls Intelligent?

Despite the fact that all genuine lotteries are random number games, there is a surprisingly large group of people who seem to think that lottery balls are somehow intelligent and can choose whether or not they allow themselves to get picked. Alright, so maybe no-one really believes that lottery balls are intelligent, but they certainly act that way sometimes.

Consider the common description of certain numbers as being "hot" or "cold". Hot numbers are those that have appeared most often in previous draws, and cold numbers are those that have appeared less often. Some lottery players focus on the hot numbers simply because they assume that previous draw results are in some indicative of the future. Unfortunately, they aren't, and the whole "hot" number, "cold" number idea is nothing but an illusion.

If you were to take an ordinary coin and flip it in the air, the odds of it landing heads-up or tails-up are 1 in 2, or 50%. If you flipped the coin nine times and the coin landing heads-up nine times, what are the odds of the coin landing heads-up on the tenth flip?

The answer is 50%. In a coin flip situation which has just two possible outcomes, the answer is always 50%. We may sometimes think that the past run of heads-up results alters these odds in some way, but it doesn't.

The same principle applies to the lottery. If one ball gets picked more often than all the others, it doesn't automatically follow that it is somehow "luckier" than any of the others. It's just a fluke result, and the odds of it being picked next week are exactly the same as the odds of any other number being picked.

After all of this, it should be clear that any time invested in keeping track of hot and cold numbers is really wasted time, because the past has absolutely no mathematical effect on the probability of numbers being picked in the future. Numbers aren't hot or cold... and they're certainly not intelligent.

27 October 2006