Winning The Big One!

I recently read somewhere that winning the UK national lottery is easy. All you have to do is spend £1 on a ticket with the next draw’s numbers on it. I also read that the odds of managing to do that are calculated thus:49/ (6 x (49-6)) or 1 in 13,983,816 to be more precise.

Having treated both of those facts with the contempt that they deserve, I slowly started to realise that my tactic of spending a quid every so often on 6 numbers that match my birth day, birth month, house I used to live in, house I currently live in, my wife’s birthday and my favourite number probably isn’t the best way to hit the jackpot. Anyway, to cut a long story short(er), the focus of this lab entry is to let you see if your lucky numbers would ever have won the big one, dating back from when the UK lottery started in November 1994 right up to present day.

Why? To demonstrate how easily shockwave allows us to create a web application that will draw on data someone, elsewhere on the Internet, maintains for a completely different purpose.

You’ll most likely get a shockwave security alert. I promise that it’s safe to allow permissions, but if you don’t feel sure then not allowing it will merely restrict the available results to those available when I wrote the software.

There’s an interesting article on avoiding this shockwave security alert for developers at http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_12777 At the time of writing, there have been 1277 lottery draws. This shockwave movie will do its best to update all winning draw numbers before offering you a verdict on yours. However, should the internet throw a huffy fit and it can’t find the results, it will at least be accurate up to the draw on Weds 19^th March 2008.

Pick your 6 balls and see if you’d have won. Click on a selected ball to deselect it and then alter your combination. I offer no consolation prizes if you find out that the week you forgot to put them on, your numbers came up, other than the advice not to think about it too much!

If you thought winning the real lottery is hard, then picking 6 numbers that would have won sometime in the past isn’t easy either! In fact, I suppose the odds will be 13,983,816 divided by the number of draws, so as I write this there’s a 1 in 10,950 chance. So, good luck with that one!

Thanks by the way to Richard – his website http://lottery.merseyworld.com/ is a font of all knowledge for lottery related matters, and is indeed the source I’ve used for the winning lottery numbers.

And thanks to our new junior designer, Tom, for sprucing up my attempt at graphics in the shockwave movie.

If you want to test the software with some sets of numbers that have won previously, here’s a small selection:

02,03,12,20,33,49 - 03,09,10,12,46,47 - 04,18,22,27,44,48 - 07,10,23,28,30,48 - 08,14,24,28,39,45 - 11,16,20,22,27,46