Is anything ever truly random? Especially where the lottery is concerned.
In the world we live in we experience random events every moment of every day. You could wake up, have breakfast, go to work, come home, have supper, and go to bed. Or you could wake up, go to have breakfast but find you have no eggs, get breakfast on the way to work, come home but the bridge over the river is up for a boat to get through, so you get home late, find a message from your friend, have supper, and get to bed very late, only getting a couple of hours sleep.
Random events
Or the wheel of a jet flying over your neighbourhood suddenly falls from the plane and hurtles toward the ground, missing your house by 1 inch but crushing your newly installed deck. Or an orangutan escapes from the local zoo, finds an unoccupied ice cream truck, jumps in and starts driving, leaving the zoo and speeding up and down streets two miles away from your current location you are shopping at. hile loading your groceries into the car, the ice cream truck comes barrelling into the parking lot smashing into your shopping cart sending groceries flying everywhere, covering only the new shirt you just bought and are wearing in ketchup while the orangutan gets out of the ice cream truck, looks at you, laughs and then runs away. How random is that?
Life’s outcomes are all random no matter how much you try to plan or control them, and the same goes for lottery draws. Many people think the lottery draws are not truly random but rigged some how to pull the numbers that the lottery operator wants. But lottery draws are really done randomly so nobody knows what numbers are going to be pulled. And understanding how random numbers are drawn is important to understanding the predictability and honesty of lottery draws.
One method of drawing numbers is to use a blower and balls. This physically mechanical method has numbered ping-pong-like balls inside a large plastic dome that are blown around to mix them up. One ball at a time is then randomly blown into an exit tube and makes up the sequence of the drawn numbers that your ticket has to match. The other method to select numbers is by the use of a computer to randomly generate numbers for draws based on the maximum numbers available to be generated.
Both the mechanical and electronic ways of drawing lottery numbers do so very randomly and are the accepted methods of drawing lottery numbers by jurisdictions all around the world. Each method and the equipment used must meet strict and rigid standards to pass gaming regulators’ inspection to the pass the test of random outcomes to the regulators’ minimum stardards.
Whichever method is used, the randomness is regularly debated among those with lottery knowledge, like insiders, regulatory testing labs, and mathematicians, against those who think they know how the lottery really works, such as players, computer programmers, and skeptics.