Cracking some lottery codes

From Toronto man cracked the code to scratch-lottery tickets:
"The call came around 3 a.m. Toronto time, which was midnight in Nevada where Doug Hartzell was sleeping. It was his old friend, Mohan Srivastava, phoning from Canada.

“He called me and said, ‘Man, I think I’m losing it. But I see a pattern in scratch lottery tickets,’ ” said Hartzell, recalling that 2003 conversation.

“My reaction almost instantly was like: I’m sure he’s right.”

Over their three decades of friendship, Hartzell has come to accept that Srivastava is simply smarter than most people. So when the 52-year-old geological statistician told him he could identify a winning scratch lottery ticket — without the use of pennies or fingernails — Hartzell believed him.

“There’s been so many things he’s done that after the fact, people go, ‘Oh yeah, why didn’t I see that?’ ” Hartzell said. “But Mo has one of those rare minds.”

Most people see a random jumble of numbers when they look at a scratch lottery ticket like Ontario’s “Tic Tac Toe” game. But for Srivastava, he saw that certain numbers appeared only once in the grids — and when these “singletons” lined up three in a row, chances were the ticket was a winner.

He calculated this held true 95 per cent of the time and notified the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. Within days, they pulled the game — the first time in OLG history a recall was prompted by a customer-identified flaw.

At the time, Srivastava’s discovery went largely unnoticed but today, the reserved but genial scientist is enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight after appearing in this month’s issue of Wired magazine. In the article, Srivastava discusses what he considers flaws in the lottery industry and, at the magazine’s request, conducts another test of his code-busting logic. He chose 20 tickets currently on sale in Ontario, predicting six would be winners. Four of them had payouts."
From the last part of the article:
"Today, Srivastava says it’s quite likely flawed tickets are still on store shelves. He sees potential for greater consequences —evidence suggests flawed lottery tickets are being exploited for money laundering — and is confused by the lack of will to remedy a problem he helped identify.

“If there are some people that are skimming winners, or more able to skim winners, what that means for everyone else is they’re getting more losers,” he said. “There’s kind of a cruel unfairness for the people left over who weren’t in on the trick.”"

Jonah Lehrer's write up at Wired.com Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code and Andrew Gelman's comments Statistician cracks Toronto lottery