.... a geological statistician who has cracked multiple scratch lottery tickets. This
means that he can accurately sort winning tickets from losing tickets before
removing the latex. Here is how the trick works, at least in a standard
tic-tac-toe lottery ticket:
The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would
later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight
tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an
exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated
multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number
38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card.
Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets
from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits
occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket
as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according
to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given
ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says.
“But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to
know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single
time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were
almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in
a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.
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