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It was 8 years ago, when I threw €2 into a fortune teller machine at the fair, the machine gave me numbers and I played them the lottery. I won €50 back then!
I think we can even calculate about how often it happens. My math is gonna be Amerigo-centric because I'm American and so are fortune cookies.
There are ~3 billion fortune cookies produced yearly in the USA, so 8.2 million cookies are opened per day. There are 292,201,338 PowerBall combinations. That means that there's about a 2.8% chance that someone opens a fortune cookie that has any given lotteries numbers on it. But wait! There isn't just one "the lottery"; there are 48 states and territories in the US, and my state (Washington) has four games. Assuming everyone's state is like mine, and you randomly select a lottery to play, that leaves us with a much more modest .014% chance that on a given day, someone opens a fortune cookie with their lottery number on it.
This is assuming that each individual fortune cookie made has a unique set of numbers and fortunes. They most certainly do not go through that much effort to ensure randomness when printing the tags, they're likely printed in batches of 10,000+ with all the same content and put into cookies, then the cookies are mixed before shipping to ensure random fortunes per shipped box. So the actual chances of a matching number are significantly lower considering there might only be ~100000 or less different combos of lottery numbers in the nationwide cookie supply of 8 billion.
What this does mean is that if a batch of fortune cookies did just just so happen to land on the jackpot numbers for a big lottery, you'd likely see a record number of jackpot winners and it would trigger some level of investigation into who got those numbers and how the fortune cookie companies pick them.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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