The lottery results for New York State:

http://www.nylottery.org/winner/c_winner.php

Check the 4th one down. Spooky.

It's amazing.

I mean I know it's statistically possible, but the NY evening lottery numbers for their pick three game was 911.

http://www.compunotes.com/lottery.gif

I am sufficiently spooked.

Wow, that is weird.

I win...I posted it first...just with a crappier subject...

<<MOD NOTE: Threads merged>>

oh well...live and learn

I even included a screen shot and a better title.

Considering we have the same source I say I'd won. :-)

Regardless who won, it is odd.

Smells more like a rigged marketing gimmick then anything else.

Originally posted by DanielP
Smells more like a rigged marketing gimmick then anything else.

If it is, it's a really screwed up one. :(

naw, just luck. I bet there were quite a few winners on that though. I am sure the date has come up as a number a lot before. Just this time, it means something a little different. May be spooky, but in the end, just luck

The chances of that being picked are 1 out of 1000. The odds arent too far fetched.

Yet again, I did not win lotto. I really wanted to buy some 3rd Gen Cheetahs too. Than again, I only play $1k/week/life and lotto (when its really big) so I would not have won Numbers anyhow.

Originally posted by Acronym BOY
The odds arent too far fetched.Nope. After all, if on March 30th the numbers 330 come up no one even notices. Like most coincidences, it only seems like something more because of the human characteristic of creating associations and identifying patterns. And we've all heard the phrase "nine-eleven" so much in the past year that every time you hear it in a different context it's noticeable.

Originally posted by JayC
Nope. After all, if on March 30th the numbers 330 come up no one even notices. Like most coincidences, it only seems like something more because of the human characteristic of creating associations and identifying patterns. And we've all heard the phrase "nine-eleven" so much in the past year that every time you hear it in a different context it's noticeable.

Yup.

Since it is picked twice a day, the date must come up (according to teh law of averages) every 500 days or almost every other year. And since the law of averages isnt an absolute it can happen more often or less often.

People freak out and go crazy over the silliest of things. MY grandmother called me to tell me the terrorists fixed the lotto. I spent 30 minutes on the phone explaing to her how probablity works. :D

it was a sign from god. honest.

Nah, the sign from God was the freaked out wind yesterday. It actually blew a huge tree down about 2 blocks from my house...which landed on a taxi.

Weird day.

Originally posted by lightnin
Nah, the sign from God was the freaked out wind yesterday. It actually blew a huge tree down about 2 blocks from my house...which landed on a taxi. Wow! I thought it was windy here, but that is really bad. Is your house ok? How will you get that taxi out from under the house?

:)

Originally posted by JayC
Wow! I thought it was windy here, but that is really bad. Is your house ok? How will you get that taxi out from under it?

:)

Everything's fine here...the Fire Dept. Came and got the car and the (huge) tree out of the street. It was some sight... :)

again. refer to the following doc:

http://www.skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html

Originally posted by lightnin
Nah, the sign from God was the freaked out wind yesterday. It actually blew a huge tree down about 2 blocks from my house...which landed on a taxi.

Weird day.

3 trees down in Westbury. DOT was out in minutes. Troopers were redirecting traffic. Traffic ++

Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau have the worst traffic ever. Ugh. Someone fix our road system, please! I promise I will give you all of my tax dollars.

Another odd 911 coincidence

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=520&u=/ap/20020911/ap_wo_en_bu/us_911_futures_1&printer=1

From a local online news paper (http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/today/frontpage/stories/fr091202s5.shtml).

September 12, 2002

N.Y. Lottery drawing pops up 9-1-1
The Associated Press

ALBANY — On the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a date often repeated as 9-11, the numbers that popped up for the New York Lottery were 9-1-1.

``The numbers were picked in the standard random fashion using all the same protocols,'' said Lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman. ``It's just the way the numbers came up.''

Lottery officials said Thursday that 5,631 people selected the winning sequence. They will each win $500, Hapeman said.

The 9-1-1 combination was picked so often, it reached the lottery's set limit for combinations and sold out, Hapeman said. On any given day, seven to 10 sets of numbers are ``closed out,'' she said.

Christopher M. Rump, an assistant professor of industrial engineering who studies probability at the University of Buffalo, said there was a one in 1,000 chance of the numbers ``9-1-1'' coming up on in the lottery.

``I'm a bit surprised, but I wouldn't characterize it as bizarre.'' Rump says. ``It's randomness. Every number has the same chance of coming up. People tend to read into these things. I'm sure that whatever numbers come up tonight will have some special meaning to someone, somewhere.''

A similar coincidence occurred Nov. 12 when the numbers 5-8-7 came up in the New Jersey Lottery the day American Airlines Flight 587 crashed on the New York coast.

Hapeman said Wednesday was the first time in more than a year that the 9-1-1 combination had come up in the New York Lottery. For the evening drawing, the lottery uses numbered balls circulating in a machine. When three levers are pressed, three balls pop up into tubes randomly.

Originally posted by JayC
Wow! I thought it was windy here, but that is really bad. Is your house ok? How will you get that taxi out from under it? Originally posted by lightnin
Everything's fine here...the Fire Dept. Came and got the car and the (huge) tree out of the street. It was some sight... :) Grrr... my subtle attempt at humor/lighthearted grammar flame was missed completely! So I edited my post so it's less subtle.

said there was a one in 1,000 chance of the numbers

I'm going to be a little nit-picky (for the sake of argument) and point out that it wasn't exactly 1 in 1000. The probability of getting 9-1-1 in any ONE setting is indeed 1 in 1000, but since there were two drawings the probability is very slightly higher. It works like this (I think - any stats or prob math guys in here?):

Probability of not getting 9-1-1 in one trial = 999/1000 or .999

Therefore, probability of not getting 9-1-1 in two trials = 1 - (1 - .999)*2 = .998

Therfore, probability of getting 9-1-1 in two trials = .002 which I guess is really 2/1000 - I'm actually not sure if that's right...

Anyone care to double-check my math? The one thing I do know for sure is that the probability isn't exactly 1/1000 given two trials...

-Dave

Correct. There is a 1/500 chance that it would happen in one day as there are twoo pickings fur "Numbers". But on one pull it is 1/1000. Sorry should have been more clear.

I think 5000 or so people won with an exact match. One person lives down the street from me.

Originally posted by JayC
Grrr... my subtle attempt at humor/lighthearted grammar flame was missed completely! So I edited my post so it's less subtle.

Yeah, I missed it...I'm a bit slow sometimes...

Yeah, once we lifted up the house and I was able to reattach the string to the tin can so I could get back online, everything was hunky dorey. :D

I think it was setup to be like that, dont know why..

It really doesn't seem to be too uncommon for the date to show up. I used to work at the service desk of a grocery store here in NY and sell tickets. At that point the numbers were only drawn once a day and not twice a day like they are now. Anyway, by the time afternoon rolled around, the number corresponding to the current date was almost always sold out. There were some other very common combinations (some of which made no sense whatsoever to me) that almost always were sold out. Hmph, thats the way the world goes I guess!

which I guess is really 2/1000

There is a 1/500 chance that it would happen in one day

I'm going to correct myself here as it was late and I was tired :). There is not a 1/500 chance - which is kind of the whole point I was trying to make in the first place (and then flubbed up when I wrote the end result wrong). The chance is something like 1/998.blahblah - in other words because there are two drawings the chances are increased a a tiny little bit, but not by much because the two events happen independantly of one another (think of it as being two 1/1000 chances - without one knowing the outcome of the other, your chances DO NOT decrease to 1/500...).

Anyway, my two cents...

-Dave

I thought it did.

If you flip a coin, what are the chances of it landing on heads? 1/2.

If you flip a coin, what are the chances of one of the flips landing on heads? 1/1.

Nw if you said, what are the chances of both flips being heads it would be 1/4.

The fact that thre are two drawings, doubles you opportunity/chance to get any one set of numbers. Sort of like if you roll a die, what are the chances of getting a 3? 1/6. If you roll one die than another, what are your chacnes of getting 3 on either one? 1/6 + 1/6 = 2/6 or 1/3.

If you go to this webpage (http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56497.html), it has this for an example:

Date: 8/26/96 at 12:1:19
From: Robert Ferra
Subject: Probability of being born on Monday

Dear Dr. Math:

Could I please get your take on the following problem:

To the nearest percent, the probability that any one person selected
at random was born on a Monday is 14 percent. What is the
probability, to the nearest percent, that of any seven persons chosen
at random, exactly one was born on a Monday?

Thanks so much for any help,
Bob Ferra, Ph.D.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Date: 10/24/96 at 11:17:52
From: Doctor Jaime
Subject: Re: Probability of being born on Monday

Let's begin solving a simpler problem. Let's suppose you just want the
first person to be born on a Monday and the other six to be born on
any other day. Then the probability of this happening is equal to the
probability of being born on a Monday times the probability of *not*
being born on a Monday (six times for the other six persons):

0.14 x (1-0.14)^6.

But if you want any one of the seven persons (not just the first one)
to be born on a Monday, then you want also the second, or third
or ... person to be born on a Monday (and the others on any other
day). So you have a total of seven possibilities each with the same
probability just calculated. So the total probability is

7 x 0.14 x (1-0.14)^6 = 0.39647...

and the answer is 40 percent.

-Doctor Jaime, The Math Forum

Mow lets swap in our own numbers. There are not 7 people, but rather 2 rolls of the die. The chance of the certain event happening, in our case the number 911 coming up, is 1/1000 or 0.001 or 0.1% as opposed to 14%.

If we swap in our numbers, we get:

0.001 x (1-0.001)^1

That is the probability of the numbers being drawn times the probability of the numbers not being picked.

That comes out to 0.000999

But since you want the chance of it happeing for not only the first but the second as well, you need to multiply that by 2 (like they did with 7).

2 x 0.001 x (1-0.001)^1

That comes out to 0.001998.

That is equal to 0.1998%.

That is the same as .1998/100.

That is the same as 1/500.500500500

Chances doubled. Unless my math is wrong.

Acronym BOY -

That's some good stuff you got there. It looks fairly convincing to me - I just still can't fathom why having double the trials cuts your chances in half, though. Even with the description, it just doesn't seem right to me. I read the words and they make sense but then logically I just don't get it. It could be that I'm simply mathmaticus ingnoramous...

-Dave

Originally posted by dancies
The chance is something like 1/998.blahblah - in other words because there are two drawings the chances are increased a a tiny little bit, but not by much because the two events happen independantly of one another (think of it as being two 1/1000 chances - without one knowing the outcome of the other, your chances DO NOT decrease to 1/500...).The odds are cut in half because the two events are independent of each other. But probably what you're trying to get at is how the odds would be affected if you tried to compare results between the two independent events -- for example, if you wanted to figure out the odds of both drawings having coming up as "9 1 1." Or, if you wanted to figure the odds of one of them coming up that way but only when the other one did not -- in other words, you create a relationship between the two events and your test requires a specific result from both events.

But as it is, the odds of the event happening in either drawing is exactly the same, because they are independent and involve exactly the same set of numbers. So, if the odds are 1/1000, and you do the test twice, the odds are then clearly 2/1000; or 1/500.

Originally posted by ServerSonic
It really doesn't seem to be too uncommon for the date to show up. I used to work at the service desk of a grocery store here in NY and sell tickets. At that point the numbers were only drawn once a day and not twice a day like they are now. Anyway, by the time afternoon rolled around, the number corresponding to the current date was almost always sold out. Of course, as you probably know from having sold tickets, the fact that the numbers representing the current date sell out regularly doesn't mean that they win regularly -- just that it's a combination people tend to buy. They should come up no more often than any other combination, like the person's birthdate or that of their kids, etc... but the purchase of the date is more noticeable because a large number of people buy it on the same day -- for obvious reasons -- unlike any one person's birthdate.

By the way, the NYS Lottery page linked to earlier lists all of the winning numbers for the past year. I looked through the list of winners on that twice-a-day three digit drawing, and it looks like it hadn't happened before during the period -- so the odds had been defied.

Originally posted by dancies
Acronym BOY -

That's some good stuff you got there. It looks fairly convincing to me - I just still can't fathom why having double the trials cuts your chances in half, though. Even with the description, it just doesn't seem right to me. I read the words and they make sense but then logically I just don't get it. It could be that I'm simply mathmaticus ingnoramous...

-Dave

Im pretty sure Im right, though if someone can show me a link otherwise, I wont argue one bit, but I am pretty sure I got it.

Science is funny that way. For instance, if you dropped a pieces of paper and a bowling ball on the moon, they would both hit at the same time. You would think the bowling ball would fall faster, but it doesnt. You can drop a grand piano, and all three will drop at the same speed.

Nice website by the way, I like the clean layout and colorscheme. If you designed it, good job! :)

Originally posted by JayC
By the way, the NYS Lottery page linked to earlier lists all of the winning numbers for the past year. I looked through the list of winners on that twice-a-day three digit drawing, and it looks like it hadn't happened before during the period -- so the odds had been defied.

That doesn't mean the odds have been defied. That means the timeline wasn't long enough.

Whether it happened before or not has no change on the probablilty of a certain event happening.

Just becuase I flipped a coin 5 minutes ago and it landed on heads doesnt mean that is must land on tails next time. Its still 1 out of 2 that it will land on tails.

The chances of 911 being pulled on that day were 1 out of 500. If there was onyl one drawing, the chances would have been 1 out of 1000. Take a look at the sample dealing with 7 people and Monday.

No odds were defied. The numbers 911 had the same chance of being picked as 123 or 666 or any other set of numbers between 000 and 999.