I don't play the National Lottery myself. It's not that I have any strong moral objections to it. In fact, I will be very happy to accept my halfshare when my wife wins a few millions pounds on it. However, I was very interested in the two letters concerning a program on generating Lottery numbers in the previous two issues of EUG (EUG #28 and #29).
I haven't written any sort of computer program for several years and so my BASIC skills are very rusty. But, not to be daunted, I set about writing one for myself to generate lottery numbers. It took quite a bit of doing but eventually I came up with one that works. I have put it on this disk ("U.LOTTERY") for anyone who is interested. As written, it generates fifty sets of numbers and prints them in ascending order for easy checking. I run it once a week and then check its numbers against those drawn on tv. The best I've done so far are two lines each with three numbers correct! So far, my Elk hasn't been much help in making me a millionaire.
I've come up with another program which just gives further proof of how little help my Elk is in my quest for riches. This one is called "U.FINDNOS" (also on this disk). With it, I can feed in the six numbers drawn on tv and set the computer guessing. It generates sets of six random numbers, prints them in ascending order and then checks them against the six fed in. When it picks the correct six numbers it stops.
At least, that's the theory. After several runs, it hasn't yet come up with a correct set of numbers. At the latest attempt it ran for thirteen hours and 147,500 sets of numbers without generating the correct set! Perhaps someone else might like to try the program, if their Elk has a few days to spare!
On a completely different subject; can anyone provide me with a Printer Driver that will work with View and a Canon BJ-10ex printer? I saw one in one of the very early issues of EUG but I couldn't get it to work.
Keep up the good work with EUG.
PS. At the present my spare Elk is working away on Findnos and last week's lottery numbers - still no luck after 29,000 tries!
1st February 1997