The Lab
Experiments & visualizations
A playground for looking at Powerball draws from strange angles. Nothing here is meant to predict anything — it's all just a way to ask what does 1,900 random draws look like if you squint this way?
Combinatorial vs Empirical
Two scoring models, same random pool, real draws. A live shadow test of which philosophy matches more numbers.
Collatz × Powerball
Every drawn number traces a unique path to 1 under the Collatz rule. All 69 paths overlaid; latest draw highlighted.
Ulam Spiral
1 through 69 laid out on Ulam's spiral, colored by draw frequency. Primes cluster on diagonals — does anything else?
Random Walk
Every drawn number is one N/E/S/W step. Nine thousand steps in, does the walk drift — or meander around the origin like true random should?
Sierpiński × Powerball
The chaos game with the latest draw's five numbers as vertices. Every draw is a unique fractal — drag the ratio to sharpen or soften it.
Draws on a Clock
Each draw plotted as a polygon around a 69-position clock. Centroid color shows how lopsided each pick really is.
Draws as Colors
Every draw mapped to a single color — hue from the numbers, saturation from spread, lightness from sum. 200 recent draws on a wall.
Draws in Binary
Every draw is 35 bits. Is any position biased? Is the bit-flip rate between draws really 50%? (Yes.)
Poker Test
Every draw is a hand of five. Pairs, full houses, four of a kind — observed vs what the math says you should see.
Gap Test
How long does a number sit out between appearances? Observed gap distribution vs the geometric curve math predicts.
Autocorrelation
Does last Wednesday's draw influence today's? Correlation at lags 1–30 with a Ljung-Box joint test for memory.
Fourier Fit
Smooth the red Powerball with a rolling average and the line wiggles around 13.5. We sweep five smoothing windows, fit a Fourier series at each, and ask: is the wiggle a wave, or just filtered noise pretending to be one?
The Limit Shape
Every draw is a sorted 5-tuple from 1–69. Stack 1,300+ of them and five overlapping humps emerge — one per order statistic. We compare the empirical shape to the closed-form prediction and watch it converge as N grows.
Markov Chain
Does tonight's draw-shape depend on last night's? Transition matrices over odd count, high count, and sum quintile — with a chi-square independence test.
Modular Fingerprints
Each number has a unique signature: its residues mod 2, 3, 5, and 7. Here's how those residues distribute across every draw.
Prime Factorizations
Which small primes dominate across Powerball draws? Every number broken into its prime factors.
The Space Between
Forget the numbers. Every draw is really six gaps that total 69. See the spaces that define each draw.
Draws as Chords
Every draw is five notes on a chromatic scale from C3 to A7. Tap to play the chord for any recent drawing.
Is Your Draw in π?
Type five numbers. We search the first million digits of π for the 10-digit string. Plus: which recent draws appear earliest.
RNG Tournament
Eleven random number generators — classical, cryptographic, even one seeded by the current Bitcoin block — compete to match real draws. Spoiler: no one wins.
RNG Tournament — Powerball
The same eleven RNGs, but each guesses one Powerball number per draw since the 2015 matrix change. 1-in-26 baseline, pure binomial — does anyone beat it?
Compression Test
Random data is incompressible. Bit-pack every draw, run gzip, compare the ratio to a cryptographic reference. If Powerball is fair, gzip barely shrinks it at all.
Reverse Engineering
Can we reverse-engineer an RNG from the draw history? Rolling Markov prediction + Berlekamp-Massey linear complexity. Both techniques come back empty-handed — the failure is the finding.
If You Had Played These Numbers
Enter five whites and a Powerball. We simulate playing those exact numbers every draw since 2015 and show the receipts — every hit, every prize, every dry spell.