With the Powerball ballooning to $650 million after Wednesday’s drawing, hopeful players have been asking: Is winning the lottery a matter of luck or something that science and artificial intelligence can predict?
Three students at the University of Salento in southern Italy say that science wins out.
They say they used AI to analyze patterns from past draws to predict future winning numbers. Their experimental approach resulted in a €43,000 jackpot in April, which now has people wondering if you can use science to win games of chance.
So did AI actually predict that outcome?
The students say using two years’ worth of lottery data and focusing on recurring number patterns rather than attempting to forecast random draws leads to a successful lottery win.
This is a big departure from traditional gambling strategies that often bank on “rare” numbers, hypothesizing that there will be a statistical balance over time.
Helpfully, they got a tip from Diego Manca, a local betting shop owner, SiGMA World reports.
“The three of them came to me just under a month ago asking for information about ‘late’ numbers. They wanted to know whether, in my experience, it was better to bet on numbers that hadn’t been drawn for a long time,” Manca reportedly said.
“I suggested that, based on my experience, it might be more profitable to bet on numbers that are drawn most frequently on a given wheel,” he said. “They took my advice into account and developed a mathematical system based on it.”
Is the lottery really random?
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