One of the occupational hazards of what I do is that I hear from folks who think they have "cracked the code." Because I'm not a mathematician, I get to be open-minded on this matter. To my way of thinking, the worst that can happen is that I'll witness a run of crazy coincidences and, because there is no law of nature that prevents it, maybe even make a little money on them before the run ends. The "run of three coincidences" is enshrined in my long-standing rule: See One, Count Two, Play Three, and STOP!
This afternoon I was thinking about mswiz777's Combos Which Have NOT Hit This Year workup and also about the code I wrote to produce my version of that list.
Then I was thinking about the code I wrote to produce a list of that shows how long it's been since each straight has fallen.
Then I was thinking about how inconvenient it is that a calendar year of draws is only 730 draws rather than 1000 draws.
Then I thought about the "rolling window" of draw days that my Sync code is built around and it occurred to me that there's no reason why I couldn't write code to look at a rolling window of 500 days to make up a thousand draws. For two-draw-a-day lotteries like Virginia, that would be 500 days. And, given a large number of draws, each straight would eventually (over a zillion draws) end up being quasi-periodic with a period of 500 draw days.
Then I was thinking about the statistics of 1000 draws over a range of 1000 straight numbers.
Then I started looking at the chart of the actual past 1000 Virginia draws.
Then all that crap swirled around in my brain at once and combined with the caffeine I've consumed today and culminated in a brief shining moment where I thought...
I cracked the code!!!



P.S. I did not crack the code. However, I'm documenting all this (with a dash of self-deprecating humor) in the hope that at some point during the holidays, I will have time to sit down and mash all this code into a program that produces a list of non-repeat numbers (numbers which haven't fallen again straight since they last fell 1000 draw ago) which should be about ready to repeat.
P.P.S. The other bit of humor that came out of this was my new word for a DRaw + yEAR = "DREAR." VAPoeboy would have loved that joke...