Doesn't the RNG constantly refresh?  So, if the clerk punched in a quick pick a split second earlier or later, you would have a different combination?  He would not have won anyway, right?

Whoever got that ticket would have been the winner.  So if the guy had not let her go first, he would have gotten the winning ticket.

One of his pals said, "It's typical for Larry to have let a woman go in front of him."

Live and learn.  Last time I let a woman with a couple of items ahead of me in a grocery line her husband and kids joined her before she got to the register.  16 cases of beer and sundry items necessary for an evening of relaxation.  Then she tried to write a check, which took a while, followed by a study of the receipt and a long argument over the price of an item she'd bought..... a call for a gopher to go back to the shelf and check the price, a manager to explain things to her....

Nope.  I cling to my place in line with hair teeth and toenails.  If she's behind me and gets a winning ticket I'd have gotten by being courteous, so be it.  I'll cheer for her.

I was with my granddad at a rural electric coop meeting once when I was a kid.  A man and woman let him in line ahead of them because he was an old man and (probably) because they wanted me in front of them where they could keep an eye on me.

Granddad won a television at the drawing and they pointed out to him that they'd have won it if they hadn't let him in line.  He gave it to them.

Fact is, the closest television broadcasts were from Roswell, 90 miles away, and a television antenna had to be about 100 feet tall to pick up better snow than you could pick up with just the set.  I doubt he figured he was giving up much.

Jack

Larry Moriarty in just one of hundreds that have either bought their losing tickets directly ahead or behind a person that bought the winning lottery ticket.  By allowing her to go first he can claim he sacrificed his chance to win so she could win.  Had he gone first and she still bought the winning ticket, he could have claimed he sacrificed his chance to win by buying the losing tickets ahead of her which allowed her to win.  Maybe by being one the few to ever reveal such a fact, he's thinking she might want to share her winnings with the persons that made such sacrifices so she could win. 

Cheese with that whine?

Lottery RNG's do refresh constantly.  There is a very very very slim chance that by letting her go in front of him she got the ticket.  The clerk would have to have had hit the create ticket button at the exact millisecond to get the same numbers.

Brad

Seems a likely motive.  Who knows?  She might be the sort to pass over a few thou to him if she remembers.  But more likely it won't take her long to be exposed to enough other rationalizations along those lines to harden her.

J

And who said "chivalry" has died,  Cheers...!

No good deed goes unpunished!

You are 100% correct. Even if she had gotten her ticket a split second sooner or later, the numbers would have been different. All this talk about letting or not letting someone in ahead of you is meaningless.

Len 

Another common misconception people have.  Anyone of us of can probably win the lottery within a minute of walking into a store, you just need the right millisecond.

That might be true for the QP players, but for the players who pick their own numbers any time is a good time if they pick the right numbers.

Everyone who says that the numbers constantly refresh are not necessarily correct.  You are all assuming that the RNG in the lottery machine is programmed a certain way.  The fact is that all lottery machines are NOT programmed the same, so the way you're making a blanket statement is not necessarily true.

You're also making the assumption (like an episode of Star Trek) that if the other person went first then somehow the time continuum would be disturbed, and the clerk would not have generated the numbers at the precise millisecond that he did for the lady.

You know what?  I think the guy was right, and he would have won if he went first.

JAG I think I agree with you on that one

He just wants a cut. Live and learn, dude. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

These RNG in the lottery terminals are just like the ones that run slot machines.  All RNG's run on the basic concept.  As long as there is a power supply the computer program is spitting out different numbers every millisecond.  This is just like the same as you getting off a slot machine and the next person hitting it big.  You would of had to have hit the SPIN button the exact same millisecond as the person that won the jackpot did too.  Now if they were instant tickets or something then I could see...but not in this case.

Brad

too bad for him.i guess it wasn't meant to be....

Like I had mentioned earlier, that's not necessarily true.  It is only true IF the RNG is programmed to use a different seed value every time a new ticket is generated. 

Perhaps it's only programmed to use a different seed once every 5 minutes. 

Or perhaps it doesn't use the internal clock as its seed.

Or there are a million other "maybe"s that could affect this story.

The only one who knows for sure is the manufacturer of the machine.

A RNG does not work like a slot machine.  What works like a slot machine is the computer's internal clock, which continually counts the number of milliseconds since the computer was powered on.  Many times, people program RNGs to use the internal clock as the RNG's seed value, because they know that the clock will not be the same from one moment to the next.

However, a programmer choosing to use a particular seed value is a lot different than the thought of a RNG as some kind of perpetually spinning random number sequence like a slot machine.  That's just not the way they work.

That's the reason that if the lottery machine was not programmed to use a different seed value every time a ticket was produced, then a different amount of time passing as a result of a different person buying the ticket would not necessarily affect the numbers generated.

As someone who has programmed many systems like this, there are too many "if"s to be able to come to an absolute decision on what would have happened if the two people hadn't changed positions in line.

A couple of years ago a woman jumped in line in front of a gentleman, and just the opposite happened.  He got the jackpot on a Quickpick.  Her excuse was she was in a hurry.  When I read his story, sometimes it pays to be a gentleman.

And, as in the instance of this story, sometimes it doesn't.  There's evidently no connection between gentlemanliness and whether it pays, insofar as the coincidence coordinators are concerned.

Which brings it down to a man having to find other reasons to be, or not to be a gentleman.  It generally relates to females, once you boil it down, a sort of reciprocity.  And whatever crimes most 21st century females are guilty of, being ladies isn't one of them.

Jack

Haha, Jack.

Well, whatever the case may be with the RNG, if I were this man, I would convince myself that I would not have won anyway, but still milk it for all it was worth.

I agree with Todd.  It all depends on how the lottery machine is programmed.  Taking that into consideration, the gentleman "could" have won if he wasnt such a "nice guy."  I wonder if he had heard the song "Nice Guys Finish Last" by the band Greenday.

That would make me angry if I had let someone go ahead of me at a line to buy lottery tickets and they ended up winning what I was supposed to. I have let people go ahead of me before at lottery counters and regretted it afterwards when I found out there was a big win from the store and that might have been the person who I let go  in front of me.

Would it make you equally angry if someone allowed you to go ahead of him in line and won the prize you'd have won if you'd kept your original place?  Where would you direct your anger?

Jack

I used to work in a store that sold tickets, and where I worked the terminal had a list inside that you could punch up and those numbers would be the next list of numbers that would be printed if someone requested a QP. In my case the terminal didn't reconfigure a new list every time someone bought a QP. I didn't look to see if the list was updated every few minutes or so. But there is a good chance that if the gentlemen and the lady were in my store at the time, it would of probably mattered, letting her go first, because that same list would probably have not changed.

I know this because there were times I coudn't think of a number to play, so I would look at the list to see which ones were potential ones that looked good.

Thank you for posting that!

Not only does it support what I was trying to say, but it's a fascinating concept as well. 

I'm actually quite shocked that the lottery would allow clerks to be able to see the upcoming Quick Pick ticket numbers!  Not exactly the best system design, IMHO.

I am not going to let another person go in front of me at a lottery line again. I don't want to miss out on the jackpot.

how can a person tell which position line is the right one

when in reno playing the hotels free competition for 250 i had picked a machine i felt would win, however the hostess directed me to another and it was the winner, so i just take whatever life offers in that regard