If a person is admitted to a good university, people will say that it is the result of his hard study; If a person succeeds in his career, people will say that it is the result of his hard work. But if a person wins the lottery, what is the reason? The answer is that there is no reason. It is a completely random event. A very important feature of "randomness" is that it shows that some things happen unpredictably without any reason. There will always be people who will win the lottery. No matter who gets the prize, it has nothing to do with whether the winner is a good person, how many lottery tickets he has bought in previous periods, whether he pays attention to the trend of winning numbers, etc.
People who don't understand the characteristics of random events often have many wrong ideas. One of the most important fallacies is that the number of winning lottery tickets is regular. Others are keen to study the "trend chart" of winning numbers, some sell all kinds of "winning secrets", and some think they have a lot of experience and regard the "law" they find as a treasure. "Lottery analysis" can even be seen in many officially published media. It is believed that the winning numbers of lottery tickets have "trend" like stocks. Various digital curves such as "two-color historical number", "remainder trend" and "five line code" are used to help lottery people predict the winning numbers of the next issue.
Now this "knowledge" has even formed a small industry, so that many websites have columns opened by lottery analysts. An analyst who thinks he knows the probability wrote, "number 2 has only appeared in three periods, while number 6 has appeared in five consecutive periods, so the probability of number 2 in the next lottery number is significantly greater than that of number 6." This statement is completely wrong.
The fact is that no matter how well the analysts say, no matter how similar the curves and trend charts are, the winning number of the next lottery has nothing to do with the previous issues. Even if this number has just been issued in the last issue, it is equally possible to issue it again in this issue.
This is because each lottery is a completely independent random event, and what has happened will not affect the future. Let's take as like as two peas in a bottle, assuming that there are six identical balls in the bottle, numbering 1 to 6. Every time you draw, you have to take any one of the six balls. Obviously, you have an equal chance of getting the six balls, which is 1 / 6. Now, assuming that 6 does appear more than 2 in the previous lottery, will you have a greater chance to draw 2 in this lottery? can't! These balls don't "remember" who has been drawn. The No. 2 ball won't come and let you draw. Their probability of being drawn is still 1 / 6.
People often misunderstand randomness and the law of large numbers - thinking that randomness means uniformity. If what happened in the past period of time is not so uniform, people mistakenly think that future events will try to "erase" the past, such as balancing the previous extra 6 with more 2. But the working mechanism of the law of large numbers is not to balance with the past. It tells you that if you draw many more times in the future, you will get a lot of 2 and 6, so that their previous little difference will be insignificant.
In fact, there was an incredible lottery in Germany. The lottery rule is to randomly select 6 numbers from 49 numbers from 1 to 49. We know that there are 13983816 different lottery combinations. The six numbers of a first prize in 1995 are exactly the same as that of a first prize in 1986!