Hello,
Moses previously posted this in one of his responses:
They combine any two draws that they wish
Lotto Wed + Lotto Sat
Lotto Wed + Thunder Ball
Lotto Wed + Daily
Lotto Wed + Euro
Lotto Wed + Eurotelemillions
Lotto Wed + Irish
OR
Lotto Sat + Thunder Ball
Lotto Sat + Euro
Lotto Sat + Daily
Lotto Sat + Irish Lotto Sat + Eurotelemillions
or indeed all other variations that is possible between all the draws (this can explain the number of machines involved)
What I have been doing is using the last 2 Lotto draws as DrawA and DrawB which would correlate to LottoWed and LottoSat in which case it does not matter which is A or B, but what Moses is saying above is Camelot might use a differnt combination for that nights drawings. Since I don't follow UK lottos I cannot confirm or deny this assertion and just trust Moses knows what he is talking about. So that is why he wanted a generic way to enter a Draw A or Draw B so he could mix and match between the various UK lotteries.
So I think we have made a good base to work from.
As far as data.txt the format of a line is as follows:
44,30030544142210,1,1, 2
The first field just indicates this is the largest ball for this draw, the 2nd field contains the draw balls, the 3rd and 5th fields are counters of some kind, and the 4th field indicates the UK lottery this draw came from. Moses used a number of past/present UK lotteries to build up this database. For our program I only care about the 2nd field (14 characters) which contains the draw balls. So when reading in the draw file into memory I skip the first 3 characters on the line, read the next 14 characters and build a 7 ball draw data structure. So that is why I say that currently the program is not generic in that it can work for any lottery because it is assuming a particular file format for reading the database in and that the lottery draw contains 7 balls. This would have to be fixed to make it work for pick5 or pick6 lotteries. Its not difficult work but I took some shortcuts to get it working quickly.
Its interesting seeing some of these results in that most people are going for the jackpot, but what if we turned everything inside out and attacked the match3 instead. Can we spend 1000 to make 2000 per draw going soley for match3?
The last example I showed 53000 predictions with almost 4000 match3 winners. What is the distribution of those match3 winners did they come from a predominate 3 number grouping? If so can we try and zero in on what that 3 number grouping is and just play those combinations heavy, because your bound to hit match4 and match5 also. So I think it would be interesting in trying to find the match3 distribution and try to correlate it.
Jimmy