What is OmniNerd?

Welcome! OmniNerd's content is generated by you, the reader. Through voting and moderation we strive to highlight the nerdiest of what's around and provide content that's a little more thought provoking than other sites.

Submit New Content

Voting Booth

Choosing Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential running mate was?

42 votes, 9 comments
1
Nerd-It
+ -

RE: Where's the analysis?

Comment comment by scottb on 02 November 2007

Moreover, the lottery is drawn pretty close to the same time every day. It's done live on TV, in a scheduled slot. I doubt there's more than a few minutes variation in time-of-day from drawing to drawing. How accurate might you have to measure to get an input with sufficient precision to make useful predictions? Milliseconds? Picoseconds?

If the relationship between time of day and the drawing is deterministic, but it's that non-linearly dependent on the conditions (the precise picosecond), I doubt you could prove it - even if you had access to the machines to instrument them and a huge experimental budget.

Star This to Save in Your Profile Favorite
Thread parent sort order:
Highest Voted : Lowest Voted : Oldest : Newest
Thread verbosity:
Expand All : Minimize Replies to Comments
1 Nerd-It - +
RE: Where's the analysis? by VnutZ :: NR8

You forget ... a distributed network of monkey processing slaves. We can simulate anything with their collective powers so long they don't get distracted in a poop-fight.

The lottery does move around occasionally. Didn't they make some provision to make the $370 million drawing out of NYC? But, analyzing the location is equivalent to simply looking at the outcome of different machines - all things no public data exists for.