More on My Lottery Program

Continuing where I left off with regards to My Lottery Program that I want to make.
It also occurred to me while starting out the design there are several stores that I could sell it in if I can get it to a semi-professional status. All of them sell lottery tickets, so it would be a natural for them to have a program, made by somebody in the family non-the-less, to help people pick ticket numbers. It may entice them to buy more tickets, which equals more revenue for the stores. Unless of course there are rules against having such a program in a store that sells lottery tickets.
In regards to Lottery Wheels, another example. Let’s say you have 7 numbers you want to play on the Mega Millions (not counting the Mega Ball) you will end up playing 9 tickets to guarantee a win of 4 numbers. Again, 4 of the 7 numbers you picked have to come up, so the guarantee just says that one of the tickets will be a winner in the event 4 of your 7 are drawn, which you can’t guarantee with just a pure random selection.
Random numbers is such an interesting concept. You would think randomness would be easy to achieve, but say if they drop all the numbers into the lottery bin in the same order, at the same rate every time, and the paddles in the bin are in the same spot every time, your ability to be truly random, even with a machine like a lottery machine goes down some. Computers have an even harder time generating truly random numbers. The Free Cell game you have on your computer has 1 million different deals (on XP anyhow, only 32,000 on older versions, see the previous link for more details of the number of deals and solvable/unsolvable ones). Nobody programmed all 1 million deals in (or 32,000 for that matter0, laying out what order each card will come out in. The way they archive it is that they give the random number generator a number called a seed, and from there it generates a random pattern, except after the first time, the same seed results in the same pattern. Generally to pull a “true” random number the computer will use the time clock, the problem is, two otherwise equal PCs doing the same task at the exact same time would get the same results, so you are once again not truly random, though this is normally random enough for most things. There is a logical reason for computers to be so predictable with random numbers, and that is testing. By constantly giving it the same set of seed values you can predict how it should behave and find problems with other aspects of a program or something before seeding it with a truly random number.
Anyhow, there are some features that I plan on adding that I haven’t seen in any of the other programs yet, but then again some of them don’t have free time limited demos, so I can’t be sure, I don’t recall seeing these features on any of their feature pages. Since they don’t mention it, I won’t mention this feature until the program is out since this may make me a unique entry in the market place.