Are the Irish Lotto Numbers now Cursed?
By Chris McQuillan on Nov 22, 2005 in News and Analysis
The numbers of the Irish Lotto Draw are:
- 4 8 15 16 23 24
When you simply invert the 24 to make 42, that just becomes freaky. Conveniently, the site appears to be down at the moment, perhaps due to excessive requests, I don’t know. Or perhaps the curse has struck.
In the mean time, you can access the Google Cache of the page, and see the numbers. :)
Anyone clever and mathematical want to work out the odds for that one?
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Ah, I believe I fit the description. Unless the Irish Lotto is odd, the rules are the same as everyone elses. The probability of any particular set of numbers being drawn, discarding the order, is: -
P = 49C6 = (49!/6!(49-6)!) = 13,983,816.
So about 1 in 14,000,000.
Although, if you allow for the odd digit reversal, things become more complicated. However, it’s not going to be anything much better than about 1 in 7,000,000.
But given the number of lottery draws around the world, and the number of times that the draws occur… the chance is not overwhelmingly improbable that one of them somewhere would draw out numbers quite close to Lost’s favourite combination. What’s interesting is that they happened to be drawn after Lost had begun airing, and that Chris was watching at the exact moment.
Roberdin | Nov 22, 2005 | Reply