Major Update to Spreadsheet in Progress

Yes, we're IN for this Wednesday's big $178 million jackpot drawing.

I'm in the process of performing some major tweaks to the lottery picking spreadsheet - hopefully to be completed before tomorrow nights drawing. Here's what I'm working on: The Delta number analysis looks at one number and difference between it and the next. The spreadsheet already looks at the Deltas between the 1st and 2nd, 2nd and 3rd, etc - whiteball numbers - but a new analysis will examine the Delta between the whiteball number that was picked in that particular position and the previous number. My analysis shows that range falls within a particularly range over 85% of the time for each position over the life of the drawings.

Speaking of life of the drawings. Never too late to learn something. It turns out that one of the reasons that 54 and 55 seemss to be on the low end of probability in getting picked over the life of the lottery is that they weren't added until August 28th of 2005. Because of that I went back and changed my statistical analysis to examine only the draws since that time.

I'm also working on a variance acceptance factor too. Right now, if the analysis of a a set of numbers doesn't pass all the tests I perform - the whole set gets thrown out. With the new rules if the set passes all but one of the tests? It's good to go. Which might help us if, say everything looks good for the number set except for maybe the sum of the first five which might be just inside or outside a given range.