Joan R. Ginther won the Texas lottery four times and is considered by some to be the luckiest person alive and why not, the chances of this has been calculated to be one in eighteen septillion and this luck could only come once in a quadrillion years.
But other more educated people doubt this statement and believe that Ms Ginther being a PhD from Stanford in statistics might have determined the algorithm that determines the winner and thus won these lotteries not out of luck but by science.
We know that these slot machines and lotteries are based on random number generation algorithms, but the question comes to mind that if these are truly randomly generated then how could someone have predicted their outcomes? The answer lies in the fact in study of random number algorithms.
If you have ever taken an introductory programming course then the first lecture taught by most teachers is that computers are dumb, which essentially means that they don’t know anything and do only what is programmed into them.
This statement has large implications and as such means that you can’t actually generate random numbers using computer code. However random numbers play a very important role in computers ranging from games to complex security systems they are used very frequently.
There are two types of random number generation algorithms, Pseudo Random Number Generation algorithms (PRNGs) and True Random Number Generation Algorithms (TRNGs).
PRNGs generate random numbers by using only algorithms and are as such not truly random since the presence of an algorithm means that they are deterministic and hence can be predicted however these random numbers are efficient. A very rough example would be using digits of pi.
TRNGs on the other hand are based on a natural phenomenon which occurs randomly like atmospheric noise, dice rolls etc. these are in effect true random numbers. These number algorithms are however not very efficient but produce non predictable results.
Chanwoo's Weekly Tech 