This year I am organizing East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) 2011 at the University of Waterloo, on April 9th. 

ECCAD is a long running series of annual one-day meetings for those interested in...

The Canadian Lotto649 draws are randomized the old fashioned way, the draws are held using a Ryo-Catteau Tulipe ball machine made by a well respected French Company. The draws are video recorded in a secure studio, and broadcast live.  There is no reason to suspect that these draws might not be random, but let us look at some ways we might detect it if it were not random.

You could look at the Lottery draws as a generator for a binary sequence as I did in my previous post, but as Robert Israel pointed out in the comments, that encoding can hide some non-random behavior (e.g. if the number 25 appeared in every draw, that encoding would not appear less random).

This is not really the next part in my randomness series, but more of an aside.  I used Maple's embedded components to use the Lotto649 drawing data from my last post to create a historical lottery simulator.  Basically, you fill in your prefered numbers, and it simulates you playing the lottery in every draw since 1982.

In this series of blog posts, I have picked on Baseball win-loss records already.  Looking for other sources of things that might or might not be random, I decided to look at lottery draws.  Since I live in Canada, the obvious lottery to look at is the national Lotto 6/49.

A lotto 6/49 draw consists of drawing 6 numbered balls from...

If you are interested in listing to me ramble for an hour about integration algorithms, it looks like the recording of the Webinar I gave in early September has been posted to the academic webinar archive: Theory and Practice of Symbolic Integration in Maple. I tried to make it a broad introduction for someone with...