I don't know if most people that read this forum are following "The Great Take5 Mystery", but it's been solved. The mystery is why have 44 sets of 5 duplicate winning numbers been drawn in the 6,587 drawings that have happened since January 17, 1992 when Take5 began. The formula to compute it is complicated and I'm not qualified to explain why it happens, but the whole thing is nothing more than a paradox.
The definition of paradox is: "any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature." We all think it shouldn't have happened, when in reality it's actually normal and to be expected.
At any rate, the T5 paradox has caused me to re-think how I think about the numbers. We all say that a number is "hot" or it's "cold". They're as good as any terms to use to describe what's happening with any given number, but I now tend to think in terms of numbers "cycling". The lottery certainly is random, but the numbers are simply behaving normally, they cycle in, and they cycle out. Some numbers will cycle more than others. By that I mean some will cycle more frequently (hot) and some will cycle less frequently. (cold) That's all perfectly normal.
If you took all the T5 numbers that have been drawn since Day1, and plotted them on a graph, you'd get a "normal distribution" or a terrific looking bell curve. And a few numbers like the 6 and 10 would be at the far right side of the curve (most amount of hits) and a few numbers like the 11 and 25 would be at the far left side of the curve. (least amount of hits) And there'd be a TON of numbers in the middle of the curve. There's nothing paradoxical about that.
So when some purist math major tells you "You cant predict the numbers, the balls in the machine have no memory!" (That's a quote from my math major daughter) You tell 'em "Oh yeah? Why's the 6 so hot and the 3 so cold? And how come I won 25 bucks playing the super hot 17 last night?" I guarantee you they wont have answer! G5