For my entire lottery number crunching history I have only ever studied each column of games like the pick 3 in isolation, treating it as sequential games of 1 in 10 rather than the true 1:1000 the game actually is.

The next project will attempt to count frequencies across combos. Definitely a first for me.

It will analyze, by position, a starting combo and count the numbers that appeared with each number in each position. It will end up with 3 likely combos to play rather than 1, but what is the point of reinventing a wheel that uses the exact same mechanics again and again?

Credit where credit is due.... this idea was brought to light by Dr. San in the Lottery Discussion forum.

I do not think that we will break any ground other than getting me out of my "columnar isolationism", but challenges are a good way to stay sharp coding.

Since this will generate more lines to play, I will be skipping the pick 2 and the pick 4, instead focusing on the pick 3 (3 combos per draw) and adding the functionality for the pick 5 (5 combos per draw).

After the massive coding part will be a short test on the pick 3, and the seed combo will be the pick generated from the frequency script.

In other news, PA RSS feed sucks to work with, they should just put up an API like most other state lottery sites... would not be surprised to hear that they run the entire operation on a Commodore VIC 20 in COBOL...🙄

Still trying to make that auto updater for the csv files, but hitting way too many obstacles in reading the results cleanly and consistently...

JSON pa lottery coders... JSON! Try it sometime!