Sammy Larbi
5/27/2007 3:38:00 PM
holybins wrote, On 5/27/2007 9:33 AM:
> I wrote a little ruby script that takes the mega millions drawing
> history from www.megamillions.com, and then makes a quickpick with the
> most picked numbers.
>
> It's not the most intelligent thing, so any advice on how to
> streamline the code and/or how to pick with a little more flexibility
> (I know all numbers have the same probability, but I know that some
> lotter systems use history data to improve chances...somehow), that
> would be awesome.
>
I thought it would be interesting to see a graph of the data, so I
modified the script to give me just the numbers/frequency drawn and made
a chart. There's nothing too interesting there (except that it reminded
me the bigger numbers were added later), but I would change the script
in a couple of ways:
1) Most importantly, if I remember correctly the numbers above 50 (was
it 50?) were not added until some time after the first drawing. I would
dynamically figure out what percentage is missing and fill in that with
frequency numbers for > 50. Otherwise, you'll never be choosing those,
even if they are relatively frequent (unless they are really frequent
enough to catch up to the others).
2) Instead of just selecting the top numbers, I'd randomly choose
numbers whose frequency appears in the top X percentile (perhaps not
uniformly, but based on relative frequency - and even then you might
make X larger)
3) I'd add the option to check only the most frequent drawings for some
time scale (maybe limit the reporting/picking to choose based on numbers
in the last year, for instance).
4) I'd also cache the data file and only download it once per day (or
week, or whatever) so you don't have to download it every time the
program runs.
Cool stuff though. =)
Sammy Larbi