Quote:
Originally Posted by Chas H
The coin toss is not relevent to the lottery because it is a single event. The lottery is 6 mutually exclusive events. That is, once a number has been picked it can not be picked again. The odds in tossing a coin are not mutually exclusive in that the same result could happen every time.
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What you are describing is the "Gambler's Fallacy" and you are absolutely correct -- in a fair system random events cannot affect each other. But if you think about it, the probability of a combined event is itself composed of the constituent random events.
On the previous page (beginning at #35, IIRC) we discussed this in agonizing detail using coin tosses as a logical simplification of the more complex lottery balls. But since the lottery balls system is itself composed of independent events, it is no different in principle from a coin toss.
(We'd just need more coins to replicate it -- like representing a decimal number or operation using binary numbers -- the operations and values are equal.)