this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts

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There have probably been fortune cookies opened that had that day's winning lottery numbers (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by StingJay@lemmy.ml to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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[–] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.