Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Validation Of A Lottery, Xiaona Zhou

Publications and Research

The NY Pick 4 lottery consists of four "randomly" chosen digits from 0 to 9. For this to be fair, each digit should be equally likely to occur. To determine whether this is the case, a Chi-squared goodness of fit test will be applied to historical data. This provides a quantitative way of measuring how well the observed frequency of digits matches our expectations of a fair lottery. We also explore the "Lucky Sum", which is also a part of the Pick 4. We determine which sum is most likely to occur, and what the odds of winning are if …