One of the main reasons I have always tried to develop a straight shot system is of course the cost. One ticket is cheaper than a group of tickets. However, one ticket is a pain to calculate every day. Hence my move to a 7 day "forecast" window. Same cost as a daily system, but 1/7 the work involved.

Two pitfalls I avoid...

1. Playing the night pick for the day game or playing the day pick for the night. That would double the cost, and the rarity is not worth the expense.

2. Pennsylvania's "Wild Ball". Though I would have caught 2 box hits in the last 2 weeks, I cannot justify voluntarily doubling the cost for the weak payouts.

Also why I avoid working with systems that result in a matrix or working with pairs and mirrors.

At the pick 3 level, I find it more entertaining to be correct than to cash in winners that barely cover the expense of play.

Of course, on their money, expense is recalculated, such as the Cash 4 Life cash ball brute force gambit... I would never spend that kind of money on the lottery, but I WOULD spend their money...

This is my last week of house money for the pick 3, it has been a fun run for nearly 2 months.

Strategy of using the new "draws since last appearance" statistic for each digit will be altered this week. Last week I used the SMALLEST number as a tie breaker, but when reviewing the results, it appears I should have divided the longest out by 2 and used the closest to that median as a tie breaker. Q2 variance from expectancy still seems a good starting point, however I look forward to creating that Markov Decision Process script to help figure out the best interpretation of these statistics. This is probably going to take a long time. It is basically an attempt to answer the questions "Given the following statistics, which neutral number has the best chance of being drawn in the next 7 draws?" AND "which of these statistics are important, and how important is each?"

There are techniques for peeking inside of the AI "black box" to see exactly HOW it is "learning" and what it "learned"... I will need to work on those as well.

Given the biggest time soak is updating the draw histories, I am still working on scraping the PA RSS feed, since they are too cheap to have a proper RESTful API... this is one of those projects that starts with the best intentions but always ends up on the back burner when just about anything else comes up... I know what I WANT the scraper to do, read the RSS feed and store the draw info for selected games (right now Pick 3 day/Evening, pick 5 day/evening and Cash 4 Life) then read the last row of the history file and insert draws past the last recorded date... I know how to store and write the data, I just have to actually sit down and DO it...

When it comes to crastination, I'm a Pro!