After collecting QP data for a week's worth of Power Ball (Monday/Wednesday/Saturday) and the Mega Millions (Tuesday/Friday) from 3 different locations, I can see how truly bad QPs are. Not one set of 3 QPs managed to pull in more than one white ball match, and zero bonus ball matches...

Obviously One Arizona player got lucky in the MM draw last night, and looking at the payout, only 9 PA players managed a 4 out of 5 without the bonus ball...

And so it begins, the analysis part...

Step one, use the 3 QPs for each draw to "reverse engineer" matching the winning numbers for that draw... whatever that looks like. Repeat the process for each of the 5 draws for which I have collected data.

Step 2 will be to look at the ways in which the data points were manipulated to produce the winners and look for any common factors so that these steps might be applied to a more general process or formula. Here is where generative AI will be used. To both explore the concept and to generate starter code for a program that takes as input 3 QP lines and applies processing to generate one "best guess" pick.

Step 3 will be to test... getting 3 cheap QPs for the draw early enough to apply the process and then play a 4th ticket for the same draw with the processed result.

I do not have high hopes for this method, and it falls primarily under the category of "no stone unturned". This could, in theory, provide a seed for the vertical horizon system that works better than using the most frequent overall numbers... or not.

The up side is that all other play is suspended, so there is a small benefit financially.

Happy Coding!