"Gamblers' Forum" from The Gambling Guides' Network

[johnph77]

Been a lot of exchange of information concerning Powerball in, of all places, the United Poker Forum, of which I've contributed a bit. But it's going to start to make me wonder, just how random are the ticket selections when one purchases a random ticket?

When I was first involved in computers in the late '70's and mid '80's, I used to do a lot of programming in the various forms of the BASIC languages, most notably Applesoft, Integer Basic (Apple II), GWBasic and QBasic. When a random number generator (RNG) was utilized, it would ask you for a random number between 65,336 and -65,335, for a choice of 131,072 possible random numbers - 0 would be included.

When there are more possibilities than these numbers I was wondering whether multiple processors are used or whather the RNG is utilized more than once. If so, in order to make the random number selection truly random the total numbers of possible selections would have to be a multiple of the possibilities - in the case of Powerball, 120,526,770. But there's still a rub.

I still have QBasic on my desktop. My old programs utilizing the RNG in QBasic and selecting the same random number offer the very same output as they did on the old Pentium 90 processor computer on which they were originally written. Therefore I was wondering if the RNG in the lottery processes is truly a random ticket generator. How do they generate a truly random ticket given this? Any thoughts? Discussion?

[Admin - Stephen]

You make some interesting points here, not least because promoters are keen to assure us that their numbers use a random number generator algorithm.

We probably should all know something more about how truly random numbers picked by computers can be. Any follow-ups gratefully welcomed.

Thanks John for this

Best
Stephen
Admin