
“Technical difficulties” plague Arizona lottery; same winning numbers drawn - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/1-4-8-12-28-glitch-causes-same-lottery-numbers-to-hit-multiple-times-in-arizona/
======
Evansbee
This would seem to indicate that the best strategy for playing the lottery was
to pick the numbers that came up last time. If it's truly random, they're
equally likely to win again and if the random number generator is broken,
they're more likely to show up again.

~~~
fenwick67
This is assuming they would even honor it. They might have a loophole to say
"well it obviously wasn't working properly so too bad".

------
got2surf
Anyone have an idea of how "technical difficulties" got introduced into the
process? What comes to mind is (maybe) using a default seed? Re-initializing
the number-picking-machine? Am really curious to see what kind of logical bug
could lead to duplicate numbers in pairs like _September 28 and September 30,
and ... September 29 and October 3_.

~~~
mrguyorama
One idea is if the call to the random number generator was designed to return
either random data OR an error code indicating failure. Multiple failures of
the same type would therefore produce the same numbers, barring any sort of
"mixing" with other random or non-random data.

This is wild conjecture of course

