ThomasM

Hi, I'm new here and looking for a bit of help and some overall conversation on a new project I'm working on. It fundamentally surrounds an international online lottery pool where visitors can join, buy a lottery ticket and then use the power of numbers to decrease the odds of a potential win, and then share in the winnings equally.

We will be purchasing tickets on the order of 50,000 at a time.

A few questions that I have, some quite simple, so I apologize! Your help and insight is much appreciated.

I have written all the necessary scripts to generate a set of numbers - 6 number from 1-49. The script doesn't allow the same number to be chosen twice, for obvious reasons. I know need to ensure that any set of 6 numbers is unique, and hasn't been chosen before (sitting in the database). I of course need to compare all the possible variations of this 6 number set to the existing numbers in the db. I can't quite remember how to calculate how many variations a set of numbers can have - so I need to figure this out as well as some logic on how to run through all possibilities and do a compare. Can anyone shed a little light on this one?

Also, I'm looking for some collaboration on overall lottery probabilities and figures - If you are legitimately interested in this field and would like to help out in any capacity, please get in touch.

Thanks again! Thomas