Fan of Straight Repeats - I have something interesting for you! By request in another thread, I wrote a program to find the furthest-apart straight repeats in every state including Virginia. Today I made a small change to the code and created a program that prints all the intervals for all the numbers. Then I sorted the output looking for the most-common draw intervals. NOTE: I'm saying most-common intervals, not closest or furthest apart. It turns out that 11 draws* is the most-common interval between straight repeats in Virginia. 2 draws, 26 draws and 27 draws is the second-most common interval between straight repeats in Virginia. I made a table of those below for all the intervals 62 and below. I chose 62 because that's about a month's worth of two-a-day draws. Take a look at the chart below and let me know what you think. I tell you what I think below...
Interval
#Draws #Times
11 32
02 29
26 29
27 29
17 26
01 25
04 25
49 24
28 24
23 23
40 23
21 23
29 23
20 22
43 22
10 22
22 22
56 22
53 22
34 22
33 22
08 21
51 21
36 21
18 21
09 20
07 20
37 20
60 20
35 20
52 19
31 19
54 19
58 19
59 19
13 18
05 18
38 18
30 18
55 17
61 17
45 17
42 17
15 17
19 17
25 17
48 17
47 17
44 17
12 16
41 16
06 16
03 15
57 15
16 14
46 14
39 13
24 13
32 13
14 12
50 11
62 10
I looked at this (double-checked it first) and thought - WTF??? Shouldn't the intervals be much larger? Like Much MUCH Larger? To say the least, this set off my WFT alarm. So I took the extreme measure of creating a random database (with numbers sourced from the irrational number Pi) and ran that known-random data through my method. Same result. Almost exactly the same. That's just the statistical nature of the beast, whether I like it or not.
Even though I was shocked speechless by this result, it tells me something about straight repeats and why they pop up so often in the draws.
*To be clear, when I say, for example, an 11 draw interval, here is an example of precisely what I mean:
03/30/2009,289,092
03/31/2009,375,795
04/01/2009,759,126
04/02/2009,058,709
04/03/2009,296,937
04/04/2009,673,970
04/05/2009,092,946
So there are 10 draws in between and the 11th draw is the repeat. This is just how I think. I may be wrong, but it's how I think and how I wrote the program to work.
There is a ton of data behind this. If anybody is interested, I can post a ton of detail, showing, for example, which straights fell 11 draws apart, which fell 2 draws apart, and so on. Just let me know what you want.
Thinking hard about what I'm seeing, it occurs to me that I may be the most surprised of all of us by this result. I thought boxed repeats might have statistics like this, but I have no idea that straights repeat so often, so close together...
All constructive questions, thoughts, and criticism are welcome.