
Voltaire's Luck: The French Philosopher Outsmarts the Lottery - ArtWomb
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/luck/voltaires-luck
======
lordnacho
A lot of the probability you learn in high school came about because people
wanted to understand certain games of chance.

The thing described here is a good example. It sounds like there were some
underpriced bonds that were also lottery coupons, and Voltaire scooped them
up.

The history of people trying to beat games of chance with math is incredibly
interesting.

Take Ed Thorp. He actually built a machine to measure how fast the ball was
going round a roulette table, out of the very first transistors on the market.
Yes, back when computers were stored in a house. If you look at the odds
though, the house advantage is only slight in most casino games. A small tilt
can favour the player.

Ed and a load of MIT people also went on to break Blackjack through a hole in
the implementation. Turns out if you don't reshuffle often, the odds change
and you can devise a system for winning.

Yet another group of MIT kids did the lottery thing again.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
The collaborator of that project was Claude Shannon. And it has been branded
as the world's first wearable computer.
[http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resourc...](http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resources/thorp-
iswc98.pdf)

~~~
claudiawerner
My third year of EE course on communication systems has given me an
appreciation for Claude Shannon :)

------
plouffy
The rules of the lottery are a bit sparse, but it sounds like a guaranteed
pool.

The lottery worked like this:

(1) If you have Hotel de Ville bonds you can participate (if not for the
lottery, these were almost free since no one thought they would actually get
paid).

(2) The pot of the lottery is 500,000 (money from government) + money from
selling tickets.

(3) An individual can only buy 1 ticket.

(4) Each ticket is not worth the same. An individual can buy one ticket at a
cost of 1/1000 of the debt you wish to be repaid on. So if you have 1,000£ of
debt, you can buy 1 ticket for 1£.

(5) You get paid 0.85 * 1000 * cost of your ticket.

(6) All tickets sold are put in a wheel of "fortune" [1]. A ticket is picked,
the value of the winning is subtracted from the pool. And this process
continues until the pool is "in debt" (however, the last ticket is redeemed in
full, so in essence it's very likely that the government would have to pay in
more than 500,000). This debt does not carry forward into the next pool

So looks like Voltaire, and his mates (with help of the notaries that were
asked to sell the tickets) were able to buy all the tickets available (and
were even able to buy the tickets discounted!) ensuring that they would
collect on >500,000 government guarantee.

[1] [http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-
Louis...](http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_227105/Claude-Louis-
Desrais/Drawing-the-lottery-at-the-Hotel-de-Ville)

~~~
OscarCunningham
This is still very confusing to me. The total amount that the bettors could
gain was 500,000 (or just over). This must have been much less than the total
value of the bonds, since otherwise the bonds would not have been worthless.
So it's not possible for Voltaire and his friends to have made more money than
they originally lost by being owners of bonds that became worthless. How did
this make Voltaire rich?

(Also, the discount that the syndicate got on the tickets should be
irrelevant. That money is going into the pool so they're getting it back
either way.)

EDIT: Aha! Maybe the way it worked it that there was actually another rule.

(7) There are only a limited number of tickets available. Many fewer than 1000
times the number of bondholders.

Then Voltaire and his friends can profit by buying up all the tickets, since
they don't hold all the bonds. Even though 500,000 was a negligible fraction
of the total value of the bonds, it was a huge multiple of the value of the
bonds held by Voltaire and his friends.

~~~
plouffy
I don't think so. The pool value is 500,000 + sold tickets. So there's no
reason for the organisers to limit the number of sold tickets. Since, as the
number of tickets sold increase, the pool value increases. As the pool value
increases, the number of bonds that gets paid off increases, so less debt for
Hotel de ville (bondholders would be paying other bondholders).

I think the key is that no one thought Hotel de Ville bonds would get repaid,
so their value would be approximately zero (or around about there). So
Voltaire could buy all the bonds for cheap. Therefore, rather than there being
a limit of the number of tickets available, he controls the number of tickets
bought, since him (and his buddies) are the only bondholders and can buy
tickets.

~~~
OscarCunningham
> So there's no reason for the organisers to limit the number of sold tickets.

But maybe they stupidly did so anyway? (Perhaps because they only knew how to
draw randomly from the number of tickets that could physically fit into a
large tumbler.)

> I think the key is that no one thought Hotel de Ville bonds would get
> repaid, so there value would be approximately zero (or around about there).
> So Voltaire could buy all the bonds for cheap.

That would also make sense, but it seems implausible to me that Voltaire would
be able to buy up the bonds cheaply after the lottery had already been
announced.

~~~
plouffy
The article mentions records of the results, but unfortunately all I could
find is the announcement of the 19th draw (I think the results of the 18th
draw are below, but they don't show names) [1]. Looks like you were right and
the number of tickets were limited to 20,000 "LE PUBLIC est averti que les
Billets de la dix-neuvième Loterie de la Ville, toujours fixés au nombre/ de
Vingt mille, depuis & compris le numéro 20001 jusques & compris le numéro
40000, commenceront d'être distribués le Samedi 19 Juin 1762"

[1] [http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-
carnavalet/o...](http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-
carnavalet/oeuvres/dix-neuvieme-loterie-de-l-hotel-de-ville-de-paris-etablie-
par-arrets-du#infos-principales)

~~~
OscarCunningham
Thanks for doing the research!

This version of the story is also more in the spirit of the original article.
It's not just that the government was more solvent than people thought;
Voltaire is making money by cleverly exploiting a technicality in the lottery
system.

------
seren
There is an interesting part in Casanova's autobiography where he is in Paris,
and he is trying to sell a Lottery implementation to the governement. If I
remember correctly he even meets a minister of Louis XV, but the project never
really starts.

Casanova was essentially a conman always looking for new scheme to make money
: he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter used to cut
Christ's ears, and used it as a divination tool to find buried treasure. And
he later used numerology.

That gives you some ideas of who was interested in Lotteries in the XVIIIth
century.

~~~
probably_wrong
> he started his careers pretending having the knife of St. Peter which used
> to cut Christ's ears

Are you sure you are not confusing "the knife used to cut Christ's ears" with
"the sword used to cut the ear of one of the men who came to arrest Jesus"?
Because I never heard the former, and I'm under the impression that I whould
have.

~~~
seren
You are correct my memory is a bit fuzzy, and your interpretation is probably
correct.

Edit : after further checking, he was pretending having the knife of st.
Peter, used to cut off the high priest servant's ear in the garden of
Gethsemane to prevent the arrest of Jesus. (Which makes more sense..)

10 Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest's
servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus.

11 Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which
my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?

John 18:10–11

~~~
mci
Except that the sword has been in Poznań, Poland for over a thousand years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Saint_Peter)

~~~
swish_bob
Historically, actually having a relic of a saint is very poorly correlated
with claiming to have a relic of a saint, even when people aren't explicitly
trying to con people.

~~~
justtopost
We really have almost zero proof that most of the 'real' relics are
legitimate. Many value the meaning more than the actual item, especially when
considering the perspective of the church.

------
acoye
[…] France had nearly gone bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised
financial instruments that magicked debt away, only for it to return
multiplied once it was discovered that the collateral wasn’t there. […]

History does rhyme …

------
yboris
In the book _How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
Paperback_ , Jordan Ellenberg discusses this as an example of a poorly-
designed lottery where people with enough mathematical sophistication and
enough financial resources could game the system:

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-
Mathematical/dp/0143...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-
Mathematical/dp/0143127535)

------
amelius
Was posted before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839755)

------
mcv
It always surprises me when Voltaire is called a philosopher. I was also
surprised when Epic Rap Battles of History picked him for their lineup of 3
western philosophers. What philosophy has he written?

My impression is that Voltaire is mostly known for him political pamphlets,
propaganda, poetry, and of course his financial investments, including gaming
the lottery.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
During the Enlightenment, the term _Les philosophes_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes))
basically refers to all public intellectuals who were proponents of
rationalism, classical liberalism, and who engaged in political criticism,
even many were not scholars on metaphysics themselves. To this day, because of
their great historical influences to political philosophy in general, they are
often simply called "philosophers".

The _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ has a good summary,

> _At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the
> philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept
> of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the
> modern sense of the term._

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire)

------
vivekd
There's a similar modern story of a Romanian man who gamed the modern lottery
by buying all possible combinations. I wonder is he was inspired by Voltaire.

[https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-
lottery-14-times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times)

------
benj111
Its says this:

"The lottery craze began in 1694 (the year of Voltaire’s birth) when the
English Parliament established a lottery"

But then goes on to mention at least 2 earlier lotteries. The wikipedia page
doesn't single this lottery out either.

So what makes this lottery special?

~~~
simonh
I suppose it means that the earlier lotteries didn't start the craze, and that
one did?

------
blancheneige
for anyone curious about the 1719 financial crisis mentioned in the first
paragraph, I recommend this short video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEVmQZ1QfM)

or read about John Law's system:
[http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-
and...](http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/70/john-law-and-the-
mississippi-bubble-1718-1720)

bonus point if you can draw frightening parallels with today's federal reserve
system.

