Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:58:17 +0000
From: Anonymouse 
Newsgroups: uk.finance
Subject: Re: Premium Bonds: random?

Steve wrote:
> "John Smith"  wrote in message news:...
> 
>>>I work in IT and I know that, technically, there is no such thing
> 
> as a
> 
>>computerised random number generator. All computer systems that choose 
>>numbers are biased in some way. This can be seen in some of the computerised 
>>US state lottery draws where a certain town, even a certain store, has a 
>>ridiculously high number of winners time after time after time.
> 
> 
> Details, please. This is not how a weak PRNG would fail. Is it
> possible, that with thousands of small town, a fairly rare event
> happens in one of them? Od that once a particular place or store is
> established as "lucky", lottery player flock there, and the higher
> number of tickets purchased there make the probability of winning
> higher?

Well said.

The degree of ignorance of the general public (and also most 
politicians) to statistics is terrifying. Witness this reaction to a 
recent survey on the effect of speed cameras, which appeared on the 
front page of a broadsheet newspaper:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=2VMAZHUTMBJU5QFIQMFCM54AVCBQYJVC?view=SECURELOGIN&grid=P21&nextPage=/RiK2/wXeR.WZvwF?7wF~/RiK2/s119/1L/OL/RGXwOL.7wF!2iG3gimiygi2Z~vg3i&resize=null&_requestid=86140


If you don't understand what a Gaussian distribution is, you should not 
be commenting on randomness, or anything else to do with statistics.

	A