[Tutor] Can anyone help me?

[bob]

At 07:28 AM 10/28/2005, Smith, Jeff wrote:
>Aren't the odds just based on how many tickets you buy?  The odds aren't
>affected by different people buying more tickets.  If only one person
>buys a ticket in the entire lottery system, his odds of winning are the
>same as if two people play, and the same as if 20 million play.

According to the wikipedia: "In 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory>probability theory and 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics>statistics the odds in favor of an 
event or a proposition are the quantity p / (1-p), where p is the 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability>probability 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.

The probability 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.

All of this is mathematics. Sometimes one or more tickets win. Is that "luck"? 
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