2005/02/26

playing in the lottery

Last week the MegaSena was above 20 million reais (about 7 million US), I took the form but couldn't convince myself to play. The problem is that I never know which numbers to fill in.

The reasoning goes like this
1) Obviously, filling in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is ridiculous
2) The probability of another combination of 6 (out of 60) has the same probability
3) Therefor any other comination is ridiculous.
4) Conclusion: playing is ridiculous

Nevertheless, if you play you have a(n infinitesmal small) probability of winning, whereas as you don't play you will not win.

Another reasoning goes like this:
1) The probability of winning is 1 in (6 choose 60) = 50.063,860
2) Air line incident (i.e. irregularity, not necessarily an accident) statistics are measured per million flights.
3) I how can I know that if one very unlikely event happens (winning lottery), that the other (airline crash) won't happen too.
My wife says I should play, win the lottery but than never fly buy plane, but I don't trust her (she is only heir).

Soon: how human intuition fails with conditional probabilities.