This week Wired Magazine carried a very interesting story telling of a geological statistician living in Toronto, Mohan Srivastava, who has managed to crack the logic behind the Toronto scratch lottery system.
Using the premise that scratch lotteries should look like they’re random, but in fact are very carefully planned, Srivastava spent some time thinking about how similar the problems that he spent his day job solving seemed to be to that of creating lotto tickets.
And then he managed to crack the code, and then identify which scratchie tickets would be winners, before actually scratching them.
When he notified the Toronto lotteries authority and provided them with evidence of his assertions, the then current game was withdrawn from sale within a day.