boston.com: A game with a windfall for a knowing few

Via: canadiancapitalist.com: This and That: Stock Markets, Lotteries and more…

Over the next three days, Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure game called Cash WinFall, tying up the machine that spits out the pink tickets for hours at a time. Down the road at Jerry’s Place, a coffee shop in South Deerfield, Selbee’s husband, Gerald, was also spending $307,000 on Cash WinFall. Together, the couple bought more than 300,000 tickets for a game whose biggest prize – about $2 million – has been claimed exactly once in the game’s seven-year history.

Mark Kon, a professor of math and statistics at Boston University, calculated that a bettor buying even $10,000 worth of tickets would run a significant risk of losing more than they won during the July rolldown week. But someone who invested $100,000 in Cash WinFall tickets had a 72 percent chance of winning. Bettors like the Selbees, who spent at least $500,000 on the game, had almost no risk of losing money, Kon said.

Je ne connaissais pas cette constante qui semble beaucoup trop simple pour avoir dejouee des algorithmes verifiant si un nombre est alleatoire. Et pourtant, c’est le cas. Il semble que ce soit la normalite du nombre qui ait dejoue les tests.

Wikipedia: Champernowne constant

Via: digg.com: An easy-to-make sequence that fooled random number checkers

0.1234567891011121314151617181920212223…

L’article de wikipedia pointe vers deux autres constantes interessantes:
Copeland–Erdős constant
Liouville number