Hi Bonnie:
Interesting, what you've said. I hadn't looked back on them to see how they did.
The I Ching is an ancient Chinese oracle... maybe the oldest surviving, continuously used oracle in the world. I Ching simply means, The Book of Changes....... it assumes a circular movement in life, human events. Until 1150 BC it was merely a Taoist effort for determining a 'right' course of thinking within that context. Then King Wen took it a step further and asked, "What am I to do?", after which it became commonly used as an auger.
Confucius discovered the I Ching during his later life and was so impressed by the wisdom, as well as the augery that he commented, "I could have been spared a lot of trouble in my youth if I'd found the I Ching then, instead of now." But his (and his circle of scholars) studies, commentaries and refinements on the I Ching brought about far wider usage and further detail in the use.
Later, Carl Jung used it a lot, studied it, tried to explain it and tried to let it help him explain the concept of synchronicity. The detailed answers the I Ching is prone to give about events that haven't happened yet gave Jung sufficient pause for thought to cause him to do a great deal of writing about it.
It consists of 64 numbered hexagrams, each having 6 'changing lines'.... each hexagram and each of the changing lines concerns a specific area of human activity, while the changing lines define the specific position of the person asking the question within the context of that area of human activity.
A mechanical process, an attempt at random distribution of yarrow stalks, toothpicks, straws, bamboo skewers is used to identify the proper hexagram to address the question. It's a ritual, defined method of separating the stalks to produce the hexagram/changing line associated with the question.
It's amazingly accurate on most issues. Accurate enough to cause a lot of leading edge physicists to study (and now use) it in conjunction with and as an addendum issue in chaos theory studies, and Quantum research.
But I'm not certain it's ever been used to try to predict lottery outcomes.
Jack