Remember the Anselm challenge?

[Frank]

Yes, we all remember the Anselm challenge, and for a few years up to two years ago we had our own challenge here when the Lotto was still 6/49. Our challenge was for 21 numbers but you had to put them in order of priority, and your score was adjusted for any matches and weighted higher for your higher priority balls. You got 21 points if your first ball hit, 20 points for your second ball etc.

The problem for only 12 balls on a 659 matrix lottery is that its a double whammy against you for the odds. When we did the Anselm challenge with 16 balls the theoretical 'norm' was for your average score to be 1.959 based on one point per ball hit. Now that the odds are tripled and the ball numbers in your entry are reduced, the average score for your challenge is 1.220.
I think your £100 is pretty safe given the 37% increase in difficulty, according to my calculations. I'm not sure I'd want to play with so few balls. I say this after just completing a challenge in the Google RGL group. In that challenge they had 24 balls, you had to have them in priority order, and I came second bottom out of about a dozen players. If truth be told there is not enough history to the 659 lottery for my system to be any use, and I'd be surprised to hear that anyone elses system can truly work after only 44 draws.

I did some recent research on cycle lengths (including bonus) for the 6/59 format (a cycle being a period in draws for all 59 balls to come out), and I concluded:-

The average cycle length was 37 draws
max= 68 draws
min 21 draws
median= 35.5 draws
mode 33 draws.
The only useful information from this is that The UK lotto current first cycle is on draw 44, and number 45 is the only ball left to complete the cycle.
Over the last 23 draws the rate of drawing of undrawn balls has been:-
3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0.

when will 45 be drawn? Anybody's guess.

From my skip monitoring, the most common attained skip (before appearance) is zero (thats when a number repeats directly to the next draw) 11.8% of the time, and the next most common attained skip is 3 (miss 3 draws) at 9.2%. I need more data on the UK lotto really.

I'll have a raincheck on playing your game Ragnorak, maybe later.