On Sunday, May 11, 2003, at 12:22 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
Last time I played a government lottery, I didn't win the green suit and guns or the two-year vacation in exciting tropical Southeast Asia. Didn't even win the third-prize government-health-care physical. Ain't planning to play again.
I played the California Lotto game once, shortly after it started (mid-80s, as I recall). I wanted to see what the tickets looked like and whether in fact there was a hash (or other variant of crypto) on the back, as I had heard there was. Yep, for a dollar I confirmed this. I lost the losing ticket amongst my stuff many years ago. (The idea is an obvious one to our crowd. Suppose the winning number is "foobar," in some likely base. Any clod who hears this is the winning number can then use a good printer and make his own winning ticket, or so he thinks. But only the "mint" is able to generate the _other_ number, call it "foobaz," which is either a hash with a secret key of "foobar" or is otherwise computed from "foobar." John Koza, the genetic programming guy at Stanford who has authored several books on the subject, started a Gilroy-based company called Scientific Games, which did a lot of the work on lotteries and their tickets. Now they own several other betting companies. Koza sold out at least 15 years ago and concentrated on genetic programming (which has nothing to do with Scientific Games or lottery tickets).) --Tim May "The Constitution is a radical document...it is the job of the government to rein in people's rights." --President William J. Clinton