Lottery Proto is currently in test mode and only available to testers.

All are welcome to test.

To register for testing, please go to the sign-up form here.

About Lottery Proto – Rationale

In thinking about how people normally play the lottery, they will typically try to exert some personal influence over the numbers they pick. So, they'll use personalized values like birthdays, addresses, anniverseries, or other examples of relatable data.

Using Personalized Data: The Problem

The problem using these kinds of values is the working number space. Take dates for instance: you have three numbers, one representing the month, another the day, and another the year. If, for each of these, you use the raw number, then you immediately run into limitations:

  • Firstly, you can only use three numbers (Megamillions, for example, needs five plus one for the jackpot).
  • Secondly, the month range is 1-12, the date range is 1-31, and the only useful part of the year is the last two digits, which can range from 00 to 99. None of these numbers fit into any existing lottery number space.

Similarly, if you use alphabetic data, you're restricted to a range of 1-26 (english, excluding punctuation characters). If you're a programmer and familiar with ASCII, you could perhaps use those values: they represent selected ranges within the 0-255 space — again, no direct mapping to any lottery space.

But, you would like to exert some sort of personal control over the numbers you pick.

The Solution

That's where Lottery Proto comes in. The approach it uses to incorporate personalized data is two-fold:

  1. All data is reduced to character format, for uniform processing.
  2. The data is then run through a sophisticated algorithm that generates a 'seed' for the random number generator. The result:
    • Ensures randomness (as far as is possible with computer random number generators — see note below).
    • Clamps the generated random numbers to the space required by the lottery game.

In addition, since Lottery Proto uses it's own embedded random number generator, the numbers generated from the personalized data set will always be the same on any device.

With Lottery Proto, you can enter all of the personalized information you want, and it will generate numbers that that will meet the lottery space for a given position. And, those numbers are explicitly influenced by the personalized information that you entered.

Notes:

A few additional considerations when using Lottery Proto:

Note 1: Computer Random Number Generation

No computer random number generator is a true 'random event' generator. What we mean by that is that if you run a second sequence of numbers using the initial input (the 'seed'), the numbers will repeat.

Exactly.

By definition, that process can not be a true random number generator. (This applies to any game or other application that relies on random numbers, btw.) However, what it can do is generate numbers that approximate an even distribution, generated sparsely (not ordinately sequential).

Which is a workable substitute for randomness for virtually any application that needs it.

Lottery Proto uses a slighly modified implementation of the mersenne twister algorithm, which is a well-known algorithm for generating pseudo-random numbers. Lottery Proto takes the personalized information you enter, and uses that to calculate a seed for the algorithm to generate the first number. Subsequent numbers are generated by re-seeding the generator with the last prior output.

Note 2: Security

Since you are entering personalized information, you likely want to keep that information secure. Lottery Proto uses encryption to store your data. The data is stored locally on your phone and can only be accessed by the Lottery Proto app.

See our Privacy Statement for further information.