Euromillions
The Euromillions lottery jackpot today is £166 million pounds. To hit the Jackpot you need to correctly pick 5 numbers between 1 and 50 and two numbers between 1 and 11. The odds of you achieving this are apparently 117 million to one (according to the euromillions own website)
To demonstrate just how unlikely that is, lets have a maths lesson.
Of course, your odds are 117 million to one if you pick something like 3 15 28 37 43 4 8. What if you picked 1 2 3 4 5 6 7? Never going to happen right? Actually your odds of winning are exactly the same. Still going to buy a ticket?
In statistics you figure out the likelyhood of an event occuring and assign it a number between 0 and 1 (0 means zero chance and 1 means certain). Lets think about a coin to make things simple. The likelyhood of flipping a 'Head' is 0.5 and the likelyhood of flipping a 'Tail' is 0.5 (in any given flip). So what are the odds of flipping two Heads in a row? Well we take the odds and multiply them together. (0.5x0.5=0.25) Don't believe me? Here's every possibility:
HT
TH
TT
HH
All have odds of 0.25. If it helps you can think of it like this; it is certain that one of those outcomes will appear (1) and there are four possible outcomes, so divide 1 by 4 to get the probability of any given outcome. For three Heads in a row?
HHH
HHT
HTH
HTT
THH
THT
TTH
TTT
(1/8)=0.125
What you are actually doing when you buy a lottery ticket is saying 'I can flip this exact sequence of heads and tails', and we have seen that all sequences have the same probability of coming up. So when you see the winners popping champagne in the paper tomorrow morning just remember that they're just the ones who happened to flip ten heads in a row.
To demonstrate just how unlikely that is, lets have a maths lesson.
Of course, your odds are 117 million to one if you pick something like 3 15 28 37 43 4 8. What if you picked 1 2 3 4 5 6 7? Never going to happen right? Actually your odds of winning are exactly the same. Still going to buy a ticket?
In statistics you figure out the likelyhood of an event occuring and assign it a number between 0 and 1 (0 means zero chance and 1 means certain). Lets think about a coin to make things simple. The likelyhood of flipping a 'Head' is 0.5 and the likelyhood of flipping a 'Tail' is 0.5 (in any given flip). So what are the odds of flipping two Heads in a row? Well we take the odds and multiply them together. (0.5x0.5=0.25) Don't believe me? Here's every possibility:
HT
TH
TT
HH
All have odds of 0.25. If it helps you can think of it like this; it is certain that one of those outcomes will appear (1) and there are four possible outcomes, so divide 1 by 4 to get the probability of any given outcome. For three Heads in a row?
HHH
HHT
HTH
HTT
THH
THT
TTH
TTT
(1/8)=0.125
What you are actually doing when you buy a lottery ticket is saying 'I can flip this exact sequence of heads and tails', and we have seen that all sequences have the same probability of coming up. So when you see the winners popping champagne in the paper tomorrow morning just remember that they're just the ones who happened to flip ten heads in a row.
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