Now that I have the followers script functional (it has not picked a winner yet, but it has only been run a handful of times) it is time to expand on the idea I had for followers last manifested in a spreadsheet... "triangulation"

This is where you observe the followers of the last drawn number, also the 1 skip follower of the draw before last and the 2 skip follower of the draw before that... like triangulating the best pick from 3 different vantage points.

I had this in a spreadsheet that took hours to update for all of the games. What is new is the ease of only updating the draws in a csv file and the most recent followers component.

Hopefully after tomorrow, I will have the ability to analyze all 3 follower lists, create the short list of recents, then combine these 3 lists to get one pick.

Then the settings can be altered for the length of the recent pick list. That will be accomplished by not entering the last draw until the settings produce the winner. By only tweaking the list length and maybe the skip distance I do not run the risk of data starvation (not enough, where the winning number was eliminated) or overfitting (where the data is optimized for just one draw).

Given how long the old spreadsheet took to update and the fact that I did not have a "most recent" list, I hope that I can at least explore all of the possibilities of this concept.

Even if the run time will be tripled, the script runs in less than a second now.

After the new mods are in place and functional, I start looking at graphs generated using the data such as those from the matplotlib or seaborn libraries... really enjoying Python these days!