Lottery physics: ball placement and positions in lottery games

[shaab]

Summary:: Lottery physics- balls placement and positions

Hi all,

I am not a Ph.D. in physics or even close to that, I only had some physics classes when I was at high school .
the thing is that I like to examine things. I came across the lottery one time in my life and heard many assumptions about it as being a manipulated game (manipulated by weighting the balls or changing of air pressure and so on ..)

When I was watching the lottery one day I wondered about the machine itself being very fair and industry tested- approved by a global organization for lotteries .

I took a picture of how the lottery works in my country and checked many timings while the balls where mixed by the air pressure and picked through the vacuum,

the rules are :
the game always starts with the balls are hanging in the same order in the below vertical tubes until they release the button and they fall down in the rounded big transparent circle (nobody knows if it's vacuum inside the circle or not)

My assumption is:
If the balls start in the same position every time and fall down to the same space and the balls are equally weighted , the same order of balls should be maintained through all games when the balls are down that circle, am I wrong ? after that the air mixing time determines which ball will be picked and can't be predicted of course

What do you think ?

thank you :)

 

[anuttarasammyak]

Theoretically we can repeat the same result in tuning the machine. We have to count up all the conditions which could affect and I suppose it makes a big list. Hopefully we can design it so that every time we are successful as showed in an attempt like they did in

 

[Borek]

If the balls start in the same position every time and fall down to the same space and the balls are equally weighted , the same order of balls should be maintained through all games when the balls are down that circle, am I wrong ?

In an ideal case - yes, that makes sense. In a real case - not at all. Initial positions do vary, even if just by tenths of millimeter, release times do vary, even if just by microseconds, that's enough to produce completely different outcome each time, as the system is chaotic and very small differences are quickly amplified.

 

[collinsmark]

My assumption is:
If the balls start in the same position every time and fall down to the same space and the balls are equally weighted , the same order of balls should be maintained through all games when the balls are down that circle, am I wrong ? after that the air mixing time determines which ball will be picked and can't be predicted of course

(In addition to what @Borek has already mentioned), ideally, yes. But the system is extremely chaotic. Even tiny, tiny differences in the initial conditions will lead to vastly different outcomes. This does not just apply to the initial conditions of the balls and ball enclosure, but also the air pump, and even the air itself.

There's a whole area of mathematics to model and simulate such systems called Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory also has its own usefulness purely in the mathematical domain.