Saturday, October 23

A One In Four Trillion Chance Of This Happening

Israeli lotteryHere's another one of those things that isn't supposed to happen. In fact staticians reckon it's an event with only a one in four trillion chance of being repeated.

Last weekend Israel's state lottery drew exactly the same six numbers as the draw just three weeks earlier. Seen live on television the numbers were 36, 33, 32, 26, 14 and 13.

Local radio stations were flooded with calls saying that the draw must have somehoe been rigged - but, of course, it wasn't.

An official from Mifal HaPayis who run the national lottery company said, "We are in the business of luck, and when it comes to chances and probabilities anything is possible, even the rare and infrequent, like in this case."

Everything was double checked, the balls and machine were examined and it was simply one of those coincidences. Yitzhak Melechson, a professor of statistics at the University of Tel Aviv, said, "The incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years."

But these sort of things do happen, whatever the odds, as you can also read in: The Bulgarian Lottery Coincidence and The Bizarre Chinese Lottery Coincidence

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3 comments:

  1. wonder if i should start doing previous winning numbers on lottery just in case this happens again. couldnt do any worse than i do now.

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  2. Hmmmm....maybe an intersection of 'parallel earths' caused a Venn-diagramish overlap? Fascinating occurrence---good find Mike! Thanks.

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  3. Fascinating story! We'll miss you, but will be avidly reading your posts while you're away.

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