Human Interaction with Technology and Information

• Description of the data

Instant-win prize data for NJ Lottery games, specifically numbers of large prizes remaining and originally offered. Other data available includes date contest began, total number of tickets initially produced, cost of each ticket. Available at this link: scratchoff.xls is a sample Excel file to show how the data should be entered. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to collect all this data.

• Why the data is interesting

The lottery is popular, and people probably want to maximize their chances of winning large prizes. We can offer more than other lottery-related sites offer. There are no easy-to-find web sites comparing the odds of winning the different instant-win games.

• How we can obtain the data

From the New Jersey Lottery web site page on instant-win games (http://www.state.nj.us/lottery/instant/2-1_unclaimed_prizes.htm). Off that page there is a paragraph for each instant-win game that looks like this:

In the “SUPER CROSSWORD” Instant Game,

We can retrieve this paragraph for each game automatically, because the URLs are predictable (http://www.state.nj.us/lottery/instant/ig738.htm, http://www.state.nj.us/lottery/instant/ig739.htm, etc.) And we can put this together with the count of unclaimed large prizes on the main instant-win page, which contains information like this:

$50,000 - 6
$7,500 - 8
$750 - 11

• What specific questions the data will/can answer. Some of these need some thought about how they should be calculated. It would be good to start with two or three proposals for that.
  • Which games have the best odds of winning a large prize? (How do we calculate the odds for one game?)
    
  • Provide all the information about instant-win games (particularly large prizes remaining as a fraction of large prizes initially offered) on one page. (This shouldn’t be hard from the Excel spreadsheet)
  • Provide a service to cell phone users to send a query from a lottery retailer to say which of the available games has the best odds of winning a large prize. If possible, do this via picture-messaging, so the cell phone user can just send a picture of the scratch-off display case to our service and have it analyzed. (We probably have no hope of doing this for various reasons - insufficient technical expertise, it involves image recognition, too hard to test, etc., etc. Maybe we could make a static web page updated every couple of days with the information instead - ideally, one that would display nicely on a cell phone or other small device.)
    

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Data project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.