The Members Forum

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. "The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug," Srivastava says. "I thought, 'This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.'"

The second ticket was a tic-tac-toe game. Its design was straightforward: On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. On the left was a box headlined "Your Numbers," covered with a scratchable latex coating. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. If three of "Your Numbers" appeared on a board in a straight line, you'd won. Srivastava matched up each of his numbers with the digits on the boards, and much to his surprise, the ticket had a tic-tac-toe. Srivastava had won $3. "This is the smallest amount you can win, but I can't tell you how excited it made me," he says. "I felt like the king of the world."

Delighted, he decided to take a lunchtime walk to the gas station to cash in his ticket. "On my way, 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."

ABC News has the article HERE!