Original Blog Entry: Afterburners today! Coding goals are being met!

hypersoniq — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:27:24 GMT

I figured out how to create a script just for bonus ball games! That means I have entire (current matrix) histories for Cash 4 Life, Power Ball and Mega Millions!

As a kicker, the bonus balls are diverted to a second csv file as the expectancy changes in a 5 in 60 vs. a 1 in 4 (cash4life example)

I have even figured out and started the update version of the scripts. They handle the edge case of last updating in December of one year and not running it again until January of the next year! Done by reading the last date in the csv and comparing it to the date you run the update.

14 games, full history... current to today! About an hour of coding... zero errors to debug!

In case anyone is playing along at home, here is when each game (current matrix, if applicable) began...

PA Pick 3 Evening: 1977

PA Pick 4 Evening: 1980

PA Pick 3 and Pick 4 Mid Day: 2003

PA Match 6: 2004

PA Treasure Hunt: 2007

PA Cash 5 (current matrix): 2/1/2008

PA Pick 2 (mid eve), Pick 5 (mid eve) and Cash 4 Life: 2015

Power Ball (current matrix): 10/17/2015

Mega Millions (current white ball matrix): 10/31/2017

Time to finish the update scripts and begin working on the classifier script so it can be modified to run all games instead of separate versions for dailies and jackpot games. That will also need to be modified further when moving to the GUI to remove my side by side output logic, as each column's data will be assigned to a display widget dynamically based on the number of columns in the csv file.

From hours to minutes... can't believe the decades of manual updates have finally been automated! That was always the least fun aspect of this hobby.... [ More ]