Israeli Lottery Wonder Demystified
Friday, October 22, 2010 - 03:07
in Psychology & Sociology
Israel’s national lottery is all over the news these days because the same numbers (13, 14, 26, 32, 33, and 36) came up twice during one month. A journalist called an expert on gambling, Z. Gilula, a professor of statistics in Israel, and asked him about the probability of the same set of numbers being randomly picked twice. They draw 6 numbers out of 37, thus there are 37!/(31! 6!) = 2324784 different possible drawings. Therefore, the probability of any one set of six numbers is p = 1/2324784 = 4.30 * 10-7. To get this twice in a row, you need to square it, i.e. the probability is really extremely small: p2 = 1.85 * 10-13 read more
