WHAT ARE THE MOST OFTEN PICKED NUMBERS IN THE ILLINOIS STATE LOTTERY?

Question

WHAT ARE THE MOST OFTEN PICKED NUMBERS IN THE ILLINOIS STATE LOTTERY?

Answer 1

If you go to the web site it will probably tell you.  But what does it matter?

Every single draw is a totally random event.  The little plastic balls don't remember which ones are hot and which are cold.  If there was a true pattern to it, the lottery would be won each weak by a math professor.

Answer 2

If it is like Texas, the state website for the lottery has all the numbers and you can run them though a spreadsheet, sort them and count them, etc.

Of course, if you find they are not close to random, then something is wrong with the game.

here

http://www.illinoislottery.com/subsectio...

edit

I went and pulled the 2007 numbers and selected only the Lotto values, broke out the numbers and counted them.  The list is below, with the numbers drawn in the left column and the time drawn on the right.   I cannot do the statistical analysis, but 9 being drawn only 6 times and 10 only 10 seems out of line to me.  942 numbers were drawn, 6 at a time 157 drawings or 3 a week (plus one more in year).  If perfectly even, each number would have been drawn 18.1152846 times, the average of these counts is 18.11538462

the standard deviation is 4.208552665

Playing a few games with random numbers in Excel suggests that that is smaller (better) than random, but I am almost to the point of guessing.

9 6

10 10

6 12

30 12

17 13

19 13

34 13

18 14

47 14

51 14

2 15

23 15

29 15

13 16

15 16

22 16

25 16

31 16

52 16

7 17

41 17

5 18

14 18

20 18

27 18

42 18

49 18

4 19

12 19

38 19

40 19

44 19

46 19

3 20

8 20

24 20

26 20

32 20

33 20

1 21

21 21

11 22

36 22

28 23

35 23

37 23

16 24

39 24

45 24

48 24

43 25

50 28