Wired has a cool article that you should read. It talks about how this guy figured out how the random lottery algorithm on scratch-off tickets worked and used it to buy only winning lottery tickets:"I start looking at the tic-tac-toe game, and I begin to wonder how they make these things,” Srivastava says. “The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”"The funny thing is the guy works for a mining company where he deciphers seemingly random data samples to figure out where gold will be.
Anyhow, go read the article.
