RNG Tournament — Powerball
Eleven random number generators — eight classical, two cryptographic, and one seeded by the current Bitcoin block — each guess one Powerball number per draw since the October 2015 matrix change to 1–26. On an honest draw, each RNG should hit ≈3.85% — the 1-in-26 baseline. Who matches it closest?
Standings · 1,413 draws · 1 pick each
● clean spread| Rank | RNG | Hits | Rate | z (hits) | MAE | z (MAE) | Best streak | Longest miss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PCG | 66 | 4.67% | +1.61 | 8.43 | -1.38 | 2 | 102 |
| 2 | Math.random | 66 | 4.67% | +1.61 | 8.74 | +0.50 | 2 | 103 |
| 3 | Xorshift128 | 63 | 4.46% | +1.20 | 8.56 | -0.59 | 2 | 108 |
| 4 | MSWS | 61 | 4.32% | +0.92 | 8.54 | -0.72 | 2 | 92 |
| 5 | Fibonacci | 61 | 4.32% | +0.92 | 8.55 | -0.61 | 2 | 105 |
| 6 | ChaCha20 | 60 | 4.25% | +0.78 | 8.50 | -0.94 | 2 | 75 |
| 7 | SplitMix | 58 | 4.10% | +0.51 | 8.58 | -0.46 | 2 | 134 |
| 8 | Mulberry32 | 53 | 3.75% | -0.19 | 8.72 | +0.41 | 1 | 125 |
| 9 | LCG | 50 | 3.54% | -0.60 | 8.28 | -2.32 | 1 | 144 |
| 10 | Bitcoin Block | 50 | 3.54% | -0.60 | 8.49 | -0.98 | 1 | 132 |
| 11 | Web Crypto | 47 | 3.33% | -1.02 | 8.82 | +0.99 | 1 | 137 |
Hits vs Binomial expectation
Guess vs actual · per RNG
Last 60 draws, residual plot. Each dot is guess − actual for a single draw — the zero line is a perfect match, above means the RNG overshot, below means it undershot. Dashed band marks the ±8.65 expected MAE. For a fair RNG the cloud should sit symmetrically around zero with no trend.
How it works
The matrix change. On October 7, 2015, the Powerball pool changed from 1–35 to 1–26. To keep the test apples-to-apples, this tournament uses only post-change draws. The existing whites tournament uses all of history because the white-ball pool has also been 1–69 since that date.
The game. Each RNG is reseeded once at start and then asked for one Powerball prediction per draw — a single integer in 1–26 — for all 1,413 post-change draws. A hit is an exact match with the actual Powerball.
What to expect. Under a fair lottery, hits per RNG follow Binomial(n, 1/26). That gives expected 54.3 hits with σ ≈ 7.23 — so a ±2σ range of roughly ±14 hits. If any RNG consistently finished much higher than the others, that'd be an indication the RNG is somehow aligned with the lottery's implicit pattern (or broken in a way that happens to bias toward frequent-PB values).
Unlike the whites tournament, there's no “best of N picks” here — with only 26 possibilities, 50 tries would almost always land a match and the test becomes trivial. One guess per draw keeps the Bernoulli structure clean.