Even though I have seen the writing on the wall about trying to predict lottery numbers as an impossible task, I DID try for myself and not just give up. As it turns out, many of the skills with coding developed over these last 20 years are mostly directly applicable to this new quest to learn bioinformatics.

The methods used in scraping the PA website for draw updates made working with actual APIs much easier. I was able to develop a FASTA file parser to read bio data in a few minutes and create is as a reusable module. There are a few other common bio data file formats yet to come, and I will be able to incorporate these into a similar solution.

Searching for patterns that do not exist, using NumPy arrays because they are faster directly contribute to search patterns for k-mers and motifs in strings of nucleotides.

While Markov Chains were of no use in the lottery, they are literally everywhere in bioinformatics algorithms. From finding write regions of unknown DNA to predicting how proteins will fold after being built from mRNA.

Also some probability goes into such things as determining the chance of gene expression in the n-th generation of offspring using Mendel's laws.

Path traversals outside of just a CS homework assignment, finding the worst case run scenarios (big O) and planning for memory management when those DNA strings have millions of nucleotides...

Not going to sugar coat it, I have a TON of domain information to learn before I can create anything useful. This will be a challenging time learning this subject and associated knowledge required... thinking I need to brush up on physics, chemistry AND biology along the way... but it feels like a worthwhile pursuit.

And I will still play an occasional ticket, it just won't be prefaced by months or years of seemingly useless development to tell me what I already knew... it is just not possible! One ticket in a game is all it takes to have the license to daydream, and the methods used to choose numbers can get much simpler.