Range Probability

[Frank]

Hi Peter, I have been reading your posts with interest. You sound a bit like I was 17 years ago when I first started using lottery Analysis using Excel. I have stayed out of this discussion till now as I'm in semi retirement from major lottery analysis and don't want to get drawn into time consuming analysis any more. Suffice it to say, you name the statistic, I've probably been there, done it and bought the T shirt. Some of the stuff I've done is on my website, but most of it is on the hundreds of spreadsheets I've devised over the years to analyse various aspects, questions, queries cropping up in 14 years of being a member of various lottery forums. Your charts make perfect sense to me, the million dollar question is how dow we use them to predict future draws. Well , I've been doing it since 1994 and I'm not a millionaire so maybe that answers your question.
The particular topic of this thread is range low to high and as you have found from your research, all the probabilities are very low for any range, your best chance being about 5% for a range of about 40 ( going by your curve). So at best you've a 1 in 20 chance of correctly guessing the range of a future draw. If you do decide to have a go, you'll need a database of all the results that satisfy that range. You have noticed in your study of the last 158 draws that there are statistical 'pockets' of ranges that temporarily appear more than 5% of the time , I see you've spotted a span of 38 has been doing better than theoretical over the period, whereas range 35 has only done half the appearances it should.
All this is interesting. great fun to do if you're into Excel but what can you read into this for the future ?
Well I've come to the conclusion that because the lottery is random you cannot use these methods to pinpoint a named draw in the future and infer its possible range of results. However, I think just as the weather can be approximately forecast, but not exactly, these trends can illustrate short anomalies in lottery behaviour which might persist for a few draws, before correcting themselves. The trick is spotting this and deciding if it will persist or correct, and over a band of how many draws. Its far from an exact science, but thats statistics for you. Everything is as predicted in the long run on average, but in the middle you have some rough variations.
Don't let me discourage you, If you like maths and you like Excel there are far worse things you can use it for than getting your head around statistics and combinatorics, its a fascinating adventure that has given me years of pleasure.