New York's 9/11 Lottery, 09-14-02
Probability is a bastard. It seems to determine so much of what happens
in our lives, yet our control over it is tenuous at best. Being
born with blue eyes, purchasing an injurious hamburger, catching a rerun of the same episode of
a sitcom you've only seen once, watching your
favorite NBA team climb out of the cellar with a top draft choice,
being on one of the Sept. 11 planes — all are associated with inherent,
computable statistics and most play out to the
degree that we expect. When I pump gas into my car, there is 1 in 100
chance of getting a perfect pump but a 1 in 472,000,000 chance that static electricity will find the gas and cause my car
to blow up. I pump the gas — no explosion, just a credit card
transaction for $14.58.
But somehow, strange things happen.
Take Sept. 11, 2002, when the New York
Lottery drew 9-1-1 in its Nightly Numbers game. The odds against
that, you'd think, must be astronomical. In the very state where the
planes collided with the World Trade Center, the lottery picks, on its one-year anniversary, the date
itself — the most anticipated, dreaded day of the year. It has to
be rigged.
I mean, what are the odds of that?
Not that bad, really.
Almost every lottery in the country has what is known as a
"three-digit game." At the heart of the game are three
drawing machines, each drawing its own number from 0 to 9. So
essentially players select a number from 000 to 999 and the lottery, in
turn, chooses one of these numbers. There are many different ways to
play it — from matching just the first two digits to picking all
the right numbers but in the wrong order — but the heart of the
game is the same throughout.
On Sept. 11, 2002, New York's nightly
three-digit number was 9-1-1. There are 42 three-digit
drawings in a given day in the United States (several states offer two
drawings per day, one around lunchtime and one in the evening). So the
odds of 9-1-1 — or, for that matter, any particular three-digit number — coming up in one of these 42 drawings is about 41 in 1,000, or about 1 in 25.
(You'd think it would be 42 in 1,000, but probability doesn't quite work that way).
In other words, you and I both randomly choosing the same
letter of the alphabet is less likely than
9-1-1 coming up somewhere in the US on September 11. The odds of this
happening in New York were a hair worse than 1 in 500 (the state has two draws per day) and
they will continue to be at those odds as long as they run their
game in this way.
The numbers, of course, do not know what day it is. And if 9-1-1 would have come up in Pennsylvania's three-digit
drawing or DC's or Virginia's, it would have been treated with the same significance as the one in New York.
That's seven drawings on Sept. 11 alone, making the chance that 9-1-1 would come up in a seemingly significant place just under 7 in 1,000. (These are about the odds of throwing back-to-back 10s on a pair of fair dice).
The last
time that the date coincided with the order of a 3-digit drawing was in
Kansas on Aug. 20, when 820 came up. That was exactly 22 days
earlier, which seems about right, since you'd figure it would happen about 12 times during the year. (Though not once a month — most of October, November and December
is excluded because many dates in those months require four digits.)
Finally, in New York, the last time 9-1-1 came up was
Sept. 18, 1999. That is 1,103 days — or more than 2,200 drawings. The chances that the state would go that long between drawing the number combination 9-1-1 were slim (about 1 in 10), and of course became slimmer with each new draw.
Probability for lottery
games is relatively easy to determine. Probabilities for events outside
such a controlled realm are much, much harder to identify. Seemingly impossible random acts — acts that may be wonderful, horrific, miraculous or terrifying — are bound to occur: spontaneously
combusting, drawing to an inside straight flush, scoring a free place
to park downtown, being held hostage, finding that bag of purple
M&Ms. All these random things and others equally surprising will happen
at rates and times that no one can determine.
But I wouldn't
put my money on them.
— JonMichael Rasmus (jmsr525@yahoo.com)
