<html>
<body>
At 07:28 AM 10/28/2005, Smith, Jeff wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Aren't the odds just based on
how many tickets you buy? The odds aren't<br>
affected by different people buying more tickets. If only one
person<br>
buys a ticket in the entire lottery system, his odds of winning are
the<br>
same as if two people play, and the same as if 20 million
play.</blockquote><br>
According to the wikipedia: "In
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory">probability
theory</a> and
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics">statistics</a> the
<b>odds</b> in favor of an event or a proposition are the quantity
<i>p</i> / (1<i>-p</i>), where <i>p</i> is the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability">probability</a> of the
event or proposition." If you assign equal probability of winning to
each ticket then odds are how many tickets you buy relative to how many
tickets everyone else has bought. <br><br>
The <i>probability </i>of a ticket winning is 1 / m**n where m is the
highest number possible and n is the number of numbers. If a lottery uses
6 numbers each in the range 1..42 then the probability of a ticket
winning is 1/5489031744. <br><br>
All of this is mathematics. Sometimes one or more tickets win. Is that
"luck"?</body>
</html>