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The Lab

Markov Chain

If last night's draw is a coin flip for tonight's, every row of the transition matrix should look the same. If the lottery has memory, some rows pull toward their diagonal. Here are three different readings of 'draw state,' each with its own independence test.

State = how many of the five whites are odd. Six states (0 through 5). A fair lottery's rows should look the same as the marginal distribution — the row you land in shouldn't depend on the row you came from.

from ↓ / to →
0 odd
1 odd
2 odd
3 odd
4 odd
5 odd
row Σ
0 odd
1
exp 0.9
5
exp 4.9
9
exp 10.8
12
exp 11.4
6
exp 6.0
2
exp 1.0
35
1 odd
4
exp 4.8
29
exp 26.7
70
exp 58.5
48
exp 61.3
32
exp 32.2
6
exp 5.5
189
2 odd
13
exp 10.5
68
exp 58.5
113
exp 128.1
141
exp 134.3
70
exp 70.5
9
exp 12.1
414
3 odd
7
exp 11.0
56
exp 61.2
137
exp 134.0
148
exp 140.4
70
exp 73.8
15
exp 12.6
433
4 odd
7
exp 5.8
27
exp 32.2
70
exp 70.5
74
exp 74.0
44
exp 38.9
6
exp 6.6
228
5 odd
2
exp 1.0
4
exp 5.5
15
exp 12.1
11
exp 12.7
6
exp 6.6
1
exp 1.1
39
col Σ
34
189
414
434
228
39
1338
Draws
1,339
Transitions
1,338
States
6
χ²
18.13
df = 25
p-value
0.837
independence holds
|z| < 1mild excess|z| ≥ 2 excessmild deficit|z| ≥ 2 deficit

How it works

The state. Each draw collapses into a single coarse feature — how many odd whites, how many high whites, or which sum quintile it landed in. A single integer per draw, from a small alphabet.

The transitions. Walk the history in order and tally each (previous, current) pair into a matrix cell. The row is the state you came from; the column is the state you ended up in.

The independence test. Under the null hypothesis (no memory), the expected count in cell (i,j) is rowi × colj / total— exactly the pattern you'd get if the current state were chosen independently of the previous. Compare observed to expected with a Pearson chi-square. Cells with |z| ≥ 2 are highlighted warm (excess) or cool (deficit).

How it compares to autocorrelation. A linear autocorrelation catches drift toward or away from the mean. A Markov table catches patterns that aren't linear — for example, a system that always jumps extremes (low→high→low) has zero autocorrelation at lag 1 but a very lopsided transition matrix.

DISCLAIMER: Balliqa is an entertainment product. Every Powerball drawing is an independent random event. Pattern analysis of historical draws does not predict or influence future outcomes. The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338.

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