kapusta-
It didn’t take long to write – I plugged the formulas into a spreadsheet, then cut-and-pasted the results.
I’d say it took between 1-2 hours to do the bulk of the work yesterday, after spending some time two days ago on-and-off thinking about how to approach the problem.
One of the key things for a non-math person (me) was understanding how the factoring, multiplication and division worked in deriving odds. Once I figured out how “Dr. Pepper” was performing the calculations, I verified that my understanding was correct by calculating the NY lotto odds and comparing the result to the official lotto site numbers.
ames-
2 weeks ago?
Sounds to me like you can join “SJSinNYC” and “anon for this” as math mevinim (or is it mevinos?)
I’m not good at math, and am not sure my solution is correct, but I really enjoyed learning and trying new stuff in the attempt to solve it.