程阳：数学家介入美国佛罗里达州彩票

离奇彩票中奖者调查？

 

 

 

【程阳曰】2014年4月初，程阳就看到了这篇英文“报道”，这些天一直正在跟踪等待主流英文媒体报道。2014年5月8日前后中文媒体报道了此事，为了了解事件的详细情况，程阳把该英文“报道” 'Math detective' analyzes odds for suspicious lottery wins

 翻译发布在此，仅供同业交流与存档。“报道”的真实性无从考证，主流英文媒体均未报道，Google 新闻中仅有唯一的两个非媒体“报道”，事件的真伪或进展程阳持续关注中。美国的彩票中奖者信息公开制度，一般只公开中奖者姓名，并无其他相关信息，而英语中重名率之高越超中国人名，也许就是概率，没什么神奇的！

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• 程阳：澳州数学家职业赌帮如何逢赌必赢？
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• 程阳：他如何破解加拿大即开型彩票编码？

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'Math detective' analyzes odds for suspicious lottery wins

“数学侦探”分析可疑彩票中奖者的中奖几率

Apr 15, 2014 by Carol Clark

 

http://phys.org/news/2014-04-math-odds-suspicious-lottery.html

 

Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi (above in a classroom) helped do the math for a Palm Beach Post investigation of suspicious wins in the Florida Lottery. Garibaldi has since started eyeing data from the Georgia Lottery.

上图为加里波第在教室中。美国艾默里大学的数学家斯基普·加里波第（Skip Garibaldi）帮助《棕榈海滩邮报》完成了一项数学分析，分析旨在对美国佛罗里达州彩票的“嫌疑中奖者”进行调查。加里波第现在又把目光盯上了乔治亚州彩票。

 

When investigative reporter Lawrence Mower decided to dig into public records for the winners of the Florida Lottery, he noticed an intriguing pattern. Over a decade, a few names kept popping up as winners of all kinds of games. The most prolific of these winners, according to the lottery data, was a man who claimed an incredible 252 prizes during six years, for a total take of $719,000.

当调查记者劳伦斯·莫厄尔（Lawrence Mower）决定深究佛罗里达州彩票中奖者的公共记录时，他看到了一个惊人的现象。十多年来有几个名字频现各种游戏的中奖者名单。据此数据记录，收获最丰的中奖者是一男子，他在6年时间里中奖次数高252次，总中奖金额高达71万9千美元，简直不可思议！

 

程阳：加州彩票中奖者手册

程阳：十五万中国人一个名——李刚！
 

 

"If you're winning like this in Las Vegas, they're going to take you into a back room and find out how you're cracking the game," Mower said.

莫厄尔说，如果你在拉斯维加斯能玩的这般神奇，早就被监管者带到黑屋中问话了，他们一定要看看你是如何破解游戏的！

 

But when Mower asked a Florida lottery official about what seemed like a suspicious number of repeat wins by some players he was told that they could just be lucky.

但是，当莫厄尔把这个情况向佛罗里达州彩票机构反映时，机构的回答却是“那只是运气而已”。

 

Mower and his colleagues at the Palm Beach Post wanted to find out exactly how lucky these dominant players were, but they needed help calculating the odds.

莫厄尔与其《棕榈海滩邮报》同事们，要搞清楚这些超级彩票玩家究竟运气有多好，因此需要找到人帮算清楚这些中奖的几率究竟是多少。

 

"I starting looking for a mathematician who had dealt with odds and the lottery," Mower says. "That's how I found Skip."

莫厄尔开始寻找精通概率的数学家，于是找到了斯基普。

 

Skip Garibaldi, a professor in Emory's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and associate director of UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, was happy to work on the project.

斯基普·加里波第（Skip Garibaldi）是美国艾默里大学数学与计算机学院教授，也是美国加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校纯粹数学与应用数学系副主任，他很高兴进行该项研究。

 

"It was like a dream come true," says Garibaldi, whose previous research on lotteries received the Lester R. Ford Award for mathematics and is the subject of a chapter in the popular book Brain Trust by Garth Sundem. Garibaldi enjoys breaking down complex math for the general public and has appeared on 20/20, CNN and Fox & Friends.

他说“就好像是美梦成真”！加里波第之前对彩票的研究曾经荣获过美国数学协会颁发的福特奖（Lester R. Ford Award）。他擅长把复杂的数学问题大众化，曾经上过有线新闻网（CNN）以及《20/20》、《福克斯和朋友们》（Fox & Friends）等电视节目。

 

"I get this call from Lawrence, and he says, 'I have this huge database I'd like to feed you of everyone who has won more than a $600 prize in the Florida Lottery over a decade," Garibaldi recalls.

加里波第说，我接到了劳伦斯打来的电话，劳伦斯说他手头有一个数据库，详细记录了这十多年来，佛罗里达州彩票中奖超过600美元的中奖者信息。

 

Philip Stark, a statistician from the University of California, Berkeley, and Richard Arratia, a probabilist from the University of Southern California, were also recruited to work with Garibaldi on the project. The three mathematicians are now writing an academic paper that will explain their lottery findings in more technical detail.

除了加里波第以外，美国加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校的统计学家菲利普·斯塔克（Philip Stark）和南加利福尼亚大学的概率学家理查德·阿拉蒂亚（Richard Arratia）也被招募到这个项目中与他共事。3位数学家现在正撰写一篇学术论文，解释他们彩票新发新的技术细节。

 

Two of the underlying principles for the lottery analysis were probability theory and the law of large numbers, which both trace their beginnings to a 16th-century Italian mathematician, Gerolamo Cardano. In fact, it was his love of dice games and other forms of gambling that sparked Cardano to work on probability questions.

彩票分析有两个基本原理，分别是概率理论和大数法则，二者都可以追溯到16世纪的意大利数学家吉罗拉莫·卡尔达诺（Gerolamo Cardano）。事实上，正是对投骰子游戏和其他赌博方式的热爱，促使卡尔达诺从事了对概率问题的研究。

 

"The subtle point about probability or quantum mechanics," Garibaldi says, "is that there are things that we know are possible and we can calculate the probability of them happening, but they are so unlikely that no one has seen them happen and likely no one ever will. For this lottery question, something that happens to fewer than one-in-20-trillion lottery gamblers is one of these utterly implausible events." 

加里波第说，概率或者量子力学的微妙之处在于，我们知道有些事情是有可能发生的，也能计算出发生的概率，但这个概率实在太小，小到根本没人见过它们发生，而且可能永远不会有人见到。在这个彩票中奖事件中，20万亿分之一的概率却在这些赌客身上发生了，事件令人难以置信！

 

Using this generous bar for random luck, the analysis identified winners who were defying the odds during the past decade, and would have had to lose prodigious amounts of money to win so many times. The most prolific winner, for instance, would have had to spend an estimated minimum of $2.07 million to have a one-in-20-trillion shot at his 252 wins and winnings of $719,051, for a net loss of about $2.35 million.

以这些彩票中奖的实际中奖频率来看，要想获得如此多次的中奖，他们的购彩投入应该巨额资金。比如那位“超级彩票中奖者”至少应该投入207万美元，才能有20万亿分之一的概率，中奖252次，赢得719051美元，代价是投入约235万美元。

 

"But even if every single citizen in the state of Florida spent $2 million on lottery tickets," Garibaldi says, "the odds are less than one in a million that anybody would have won that many times."

加里波第解释道，就算佛罗里达州的每一位公民都花了200万美元去买彩票，有人赢那么多次的概率也低于百万分之一。

 

These kinds of figures "put us in pretty safe territory with our suspicions that something was amiss," Garibaldi says.

他说这些数据分析，让我们能很有把握地怀疑，事情很不对劲儿。

 

The mathematical analysis was also able to identify winners of multiple prizes who appeared to be legitimate gamblers. "The fact that a person claims multiple prizes does not necessarily indicate that they are doing anything suspicious," Garibaldi says. "A finer analysis and more inspection can show that some people are likely just spending a lot of money on tickets and occasionally getting lucky."

数学分析可以让我们甄别那些貌似合法博彩者的高频中奖。但里波第业强调，一个人多次中奖，并不意味着他们做了什么可疑的事情，也许只是花了很多钱买彩票而已。

 

"The math was the critical part of this story," Mower says of the package of investigative pieces published on Sunday, March 30. "It's been really valuable working with Skip because he'll see something that I won't."

2014年3月30日，莫厄尔的调查报道在《棕榈海滩邮报》上发表。莫厄尔说，“数学是这篇报道的关键部分。与斯基普的合作很有价值，因为他能看到我看不到的东西。”

 

On Monday, March 31, the state legislature called for more oversight of the Florida Lottery. On Tuesday, the lottery announced that it would adopt safeguards, such as software to track frequent winners. By Wednesday, lottery officials began raiding stores and seizing lottery equipment associated with some of the top prize winners. (Six of the 10 top winners in the lottery records were store clerks and owners who sold lottery tickets.)

2014年3月31日周一，州立法机构要求对佛罗里达彩票采取更多监管。4月1日周二，彩票管理部门宣布将采用安全措施，比如用软件来追踪高频中奖者。4月2日周三，彩票机构人员开始突袭与一些获利最丰的玩家有关的彩票销售点，并且查封了销售设备。10位榜首的中奖者，其中6位是店员与彩票点业主。

 

Meanwhile, Garibaldi started eyeing data for winners of the Georgia Lottery. "The data from the Georgia Lottery is not as good as from Florida, because Georgia only lists winners for prizes of $5,000 or more," he says. "But just casually looking at the Georgia data since 2003, I see what may be suspicious numbers for repeat winners."

现在加里波第又盯上了美国佐治亚州的彩票。他说佐治亚州的彩票中奖者记录不如佛罗里达州详细，仅仅列出了5000美元以上的中奖者。不过他随意看了一下2003年以来佐治亚州的中奖记录，就感到了很多疑点。