30th
OpenIdea: Improving The Lottery
The Callifornia “MegaMillions” lottery seemed to get some attention recently for its huge jackpot. Whenever this happens, I always hear people saying “try to pick numbers that no one else will pick, so that you don’t have to share the winnings (if you do, in fact, win).” So why doesn’t the Lottery sell unique sets of numbers for more? The odds of winning are no better, but then you also don’t have to share any of the jackpot if the numbers are picked. I’m pretty sure people would pay extra for that, but I’m not sure why the lottery administration doesn’t offer it. I suppose it might be difficult to implement a way to “guarantee” unique number sets? But it doesn’t sound that hard.
Another random lottery idea is to sell lottery data & analysis… I’m sure there are some crackpots out there who would love to pour through all the historical winning numbers to see if there are patterns. (And I’m sure the lottery administration must keep this data in order to verify that the system is fair and truly random.) Maybe the data is already free if you file with a Freedom of Information act request…?
