lottery

The lottery is in the opinion of this developer, a game for people who are bad at math. That doesn't mean it can't be a little fun to question the randomness of a process involving physical ping pong balls getting flopped around an airflow machine, right?

ticketer.py

• Reads your top14.csv file (Note, this is just the numbers 1-14, so you want to use the other programs to build your own heuristic or statistical indicators that could actually be useful.)
• Gives you 40 sets of numbers to play based on the aprioris

megaball.py

• A simple example of occurence count from a set of numbers
• Those numbers are hard coded into the program

megamillions-from-apriori.py

• Reads megamillions.csv, which is a listing through July, 2023 of the historic occurence of balls.
• Outputs each ball number's occurrence rate from 2002-July, 2023. Take note that balls 57-75 were added at some point, so their 21 year historical probabilities are heavily skewed low if you examine the entire dataset.
• One image pops up for the first ball number, then
• It generates a trend graph for each ball number
• It generates a poor, useless set of graphs of the most common ball numbers by week/month/quarter/year. This needs some work

Installation

1. Have python3 installed with devtools, usually some version of python3-full is the package name for each operating system.
2. git clone https://github.com/angrynarwhal/lottery
3. cd lottery
4. python3 -m venv ../../virtualenvs/lottery
5. source ../../virtualenvs/lottery/bin/activate
6. pip install -r requirements.txt
7. python <program name> to run!

Future execution requires fewer steps

1. Go to the root of your repository clone/fork directory
2. source ../../virtualenvs/lottery/bin/activate
3. pip install -r requirements.txt
4. python <program name> to run!

Data

Data used in this toy program were obtained from : https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/lottery-mega-millions-winning-numbers-beginning-2002

There are other datasets for the various lotteries and other, perhaps more useful questions, available at https://data.gov This is a link to a search for winning numbers I performed on the site in August, 2023: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/?tags=winning

Copyright 2023, Sean P. Goggins