About My Lotto Numbers

mylottonumbers.net, providing a simple statistical analysis of recent and historical lotto draw results. The site was born of a need to produce a website that makes use of a database application, PHP and html for a university assignment.

Why lotto numbers? Three reasons really, 1. Laziness, I needed a large readily available data set that did not require a great deal of effort to collect. 2. Convenience, The figures lend themselves very well to the kind of analytical work I needed for the site and 3. I like playing the lottery from time to time.

For the record, I know it’s impossible to predict the next set of numbers to be drawn in the lottery with any certainty. It simply can’t be done so instead, I have decided to approach the problem from a slightly different angle.

My process of thinking works sort of like this. It starts with two assumptions. 1. Every draw system has some inbuilt bias and 2. The people who run the lottery are continually changing things to try and eliminate any bias from the system.

Given these assumptions, long term trends over the life of the lottery are pretty much useless and even the short term trends will be pretty meaningless after a change to the system that created them. Sounds a bit bleak doesn’t it but there is still hope.

While the changes to the lotto draw system are designed to eliminate bias, there is no way to tell beforehand whether or not the change itself will introduce a new source of bias. Any bias introduced in this way would reveal itself over the course of the following year or so and hence, it is a bias introduced in this way that I am looking for and that I hope we will be able to find.

About Me I like playing lotto! It’s pretty much the only form of gambling that interests me. It has such low barriers to entry, is dirt cheap and it requires no skill whatsoever to play. On top of that, with weekly draws you are very unlikely to get carried away chasing losses and you have the chance to win a life changing sum of money, granted, it’s not a huge chance but it is a chance none the less.
	Aside from an interest in the lottery, I also have a love of cooking, making things out of wood and stone and in working with computers, hence the university computer science degree I am studying for.  In case you’re interested, you can see some of my other projects wood and stone work projects at bymjh.com and treetoptrove.com, sites I built to document some of my work while my wife and I’s cooking exploits can be seen at flavoursomedelights.com.

Where To Next?

My plans for this site are pretty straight forward. I’ve designed it in such a way that once I have finished developing it for the Saturday Lotto game, I will roll it out across the other Australian Lotto games as well.

After this, who knows? If there is a demand, I might even have a go at some of the bigger overseas lotteries in the US and Europe. I really don’t know. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Oh and one last thing on the subject of the ethics of promoting lottery play. I have seen the harm that gambling problems can cause and understand them fully; I also know that playing the lottery is a bit different to other harder forms of gambling with no hard evidence that its play causes these problems. How can I say this? Well I actually did the research as part of my university course. You can ready the essay on my findings below.