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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the corrupt-random-number-algorithm dept.

Aleksandar Vulovic, czar of the Serbian state lottery, has resigned from his position after winning numbers were mysteriously broadcast on television before they had been drawn.

Allegations of fraud abound on every hand following the incident, reports the Associated Press.

In what was presented to the public as a live broadcast on Tuesday evening, one of the numbers in the winning combination was revealed before the number appeared to be drawn.

"That sparked accusations that the numbers had been chosen in advance," according to AP.

Vulovic has denied there was any dodginess and explained that the incident was due to a "technical mistake".

He added that he was stepping down from his position, not out of guilt, but out of "moral obligation".


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by wantkitteh on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:26PM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:26PM (#218656) Homepage Journal

    Ok, for anyone else hating Flash right now, Youtube has an HTML5 video clip of what happened here [youtube.com]. Here's how it went down:

    1) The third ball drawn was number 27
    2) The graphics come up showing 21 - whoever it was doing the live graphics either misread or misentered the number that came up
    3) The graphics then show 27 coming up as the fourth ball - the graphics guy tried to fix his mistake but entered a new ball instead of correcting the previous one
    4) The fourth ball drawn was number 21

    The odds of it happening are 1 : (total number of balls in draw machine - number of balls already drawn)*. That's not a fix, it's a coincidence, but of course everyone paying their idiot tax is demanding that this "crime" be investigated and the evil bastards behind the fixing of their precious draw be hung drawn and quartered.

    *I'd love to tell you exactly what that was, but you try finding out how many balls there are in the Serbian state lottery with a search engine right now!

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:48PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:48PM (#218733) Journal

    I gave it 10 minutes of searching but like you, I could not find out how many balls are in the Serbian lottery. I did find a page that purported to be historical results though it may not have been for this lottery, and noted some numbers in the high 30s. If we guess it is 40 balls, and 3 are already drawn, that would make the odds 1:37, which is better than roulette (1:38), a game lots of people play.