In April, two lottery players won big prizes for identical lottery picks bought at precisely the same second from lottery machines located in Henan and Heilongjiang.
Harbin’s Modern Evening Times (新晚报) reported on the coincidence in its June 5 issue.
The blog Untrustworthy News reposted the report under the title “Out of Context,” and drew particular attention to the article’s subtitle:
Identical winning numbers bought at the same second by two different players
Interestingly, the two big winners also had the same height, weight, and blood type
by Zhang Feifei / MET
Yesterday morning (2009.06.04), Mr. Gao, a long-time lottery player in the city, reported that in the Sports Lottery’s 47th Seven Star drawing of the year (held on April 26), “twin prizes” were found in Henan and Heilongjiang. Separated by thousands of kilometers, two lottery players picked the identical number at the same second, and each won a 5 million yuan grand prize. Gao said, “Identical tickets purchased at the same second from two different machines located thousands of kilometers apart. What a coincidence!”
Using the official website to check the results for the 47th Seven Star drawing, this reporter found that a player in Henan bought a ticket for the number “3511587” at 10:17:12 on April 26, and at the very same second, Zhao Qiang (pseudonym) of Hailun, in the city of Suihua, Heilongjiang Province, picked “3511587” as well.
He Chunyang, assistant professor of mathematics at Heilongjiang University, told the paper, “Suppose you pick a two-digit number using the digits 1 to 9. That makes 81 combinations. If you have two seven-digit numbers with an identical sequence, the probability is 1/282429536481 (one in 81*81*81*81*81*81), or roughly one in 282 billion. And when you factor in the two players thousands of kilometers apart who bought tickets at precisely the same second, the probability approaches zero.”
Other lottery players joked, “This is like, at the exact same moment, two identically-sized meteors hitting two people in Henan and Helongjiang, who coincidentally have the same height, weight, and blood type.”
Yesterday afternoon, this reporter called up the Heilongjiang Sports Lottery Center, where a worker passed on an answer given by the National Sports Lottery Center: more than ten million picks are sold for each sports lottery drawing, and at the peak sales time every day, more than one hundred transactions take place every second, so it is entirely possible for two identical numbers to be picked at the same time.
- Modern Evening Times (Chinese): Identical winning numbers bought at the same second by two different players
- Untrustworthy News blog (Chinese): Out of context