Last run of the program, evening pick5. About a half of an hour to go based on the 45 minute run time of the mid day pick 5 file.
Much remains to do, but I should have the answer to if the raw follower system had any wins, and if so were there enough to be considered profitable based on the game's history file (pick 3 eve has over 16,000 draws, I used the first 1,000 for a baseline history to nake the follower program work.)

This is the backtest I could not figure out how to do until now... exciting!
I have had the idea for over a decade, but did not have any clue how to implement it. I have finally reached a level of competence with Python to get there. Funny, but now I am back where I began with a spreadsheet, just now with better data. Back testing simple stuff like +1,+1,+1 only needed the spreadsheet.

Could it have been done as a macro with VBA? Probably but not by me... I should carve out some time to learn some VBA since learning to code eventually becomes language agnostic. For example, I wrote programs in class in the last 8 weeks in both Kotlin and Swift, 2 languages I never tried before. Ended up with an A- in arguably the most difficult class I had so far.

Initial results are in.
In order to be profitable, 32 straights would be needed on the night pick 3 and 16 on the day.
Pick 5 had 0 hits over 4,000+ draws day or night and the pick 3 had 19 eve and 10 day... the raw system is NOT profitable.
Error correction may take awhile but hopefully does better than the base line... otherwise I beed a new estimation function...