But the odds that you will win are not impacted by the number of tickets that are sold in total...only the number you buy. When you take into account the total number of tickets sold, all you get are the odds that the lottery will be won by anyone.
I'm also a little confused by that def of odds. Consider flipping a coin. The probability that it will come up heads is 1/2. That def says that the odds in favor of it coming up heads is 1.
Ah there's the rub. Odds are not "in favor". The odds of heads is 1 and the odds of tails is 1. The odds therefore are the same. If you flip 2 coins then the odds of both being heads is 1/3, ditto both tails. Odds of being different is 1/2.
Jeff
- -----Original Message-----
- From: bob [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
- Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 10:52 AM
- To: Smith, Jeff; Tutor@python.org
- Subject: Re: [Tutor] Can anyone help me?
- At 07:28 AM 10/28/2005, Smith, Jeff wrote:
- Aren't the odds just based on how many tickets you buy? The odds aren't
- affected by different people buying more tickets. If only one person
- buys a ticket in the entire lottery system, his odds of winning are the
- same as if two people play, and the same as if 20 million play.
- According to the wikipedia: "In probability theory and statistics the odds in favor of an event or a proposition are the quantity p / (1-p), where p is the probability of the event or proposition." If you assign equal probability of winning to each ticket then odds are how many tickets you buy relative to how many tickets everyone else has bought.
- The probability of a ticket winning is 1 / m**n where m is the highest number possible and n is the number of numbers. If a lottery uses 6 numbers each in the range 1..42 then the probability of a ticket winning is 1/5489031744.
- All of this is mathematics. Sometimes one or more tickets win. Is that "luck"?
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