Smart Fortune Cookie 2.0
Device: iOS iPhone
Category: Utilities
Price: $.99, Version: 1.1 -> 2.0 (iTunes)
Description:Smart Fortune Cookie is an intelligent lottery/lucky number generator (see Disclaimer 1). In particular, it uses a complex context-sensitive probability model to predict the Powerball lottery numbers (see Note 1). You can think it as a variance of Bayesian model if you are an expert in this area. With the numbers generated by Smart Fortune Cookie, you can greatly increase the odds of winning a prize (see Disclaimer 2). The author had done experiments through buying tickets worth of $100 with these numbers, and got about $40 back. The odds of winning was about 1 in 8, that is about three times higher than the odds 1 in 32 stated on www.powerball.com.
You may think it is impossible. But, remember this: Nothing is absolutely random. By examining the numbers of old draws, Smart Fortune Cookie continuously updates its model trying to figure out the environmental parameters of the system where the numbers are drawn. During this process, different random numbers will be tried in each internal run of training, and the best parameters will be used to do the prediction. Your luck is still in play in this process. You will not likely see exactly same numbers each time you tap "Ask Smart Fortune Cookie". In addition to Powerball, Smart Fortune Cookie App also allows the users to generate lucky numbers to be used for other lotteries.
The user interface of Smart Fortune Cookie is simple, straightforward, and hence easy to use.There are three buttons and three text fields with which the users can interact. By tapping "Ask Smart Fortune Cookie", you will get numbers for Powerball lottery predicted by Smart Fortune Cookie with the latest model on your device. It may take one or two minutes to predict the numbers depending on the specification of your device. By tapping "My quick pick", you will get random numbers for Powerball. Among the numbers generated by touching these two buttons, the first five are for the white balls, and the last one is for the red/power ball (indicated by "pb"). By tapping "Give me", you will get a certain number (specified in the next text field, editable, up to 6) of random numbers (whose range are specified by the last two text fields, editable, up to 100).
When you run Smart Fortune Cookie for the very first time, or the first time after each Wednesdays or Saturday, it will try to load the numbers of the latest draws from the author's website in order to update the model for prediction. Make sure your internet connection is on. If it cannot load in new numbers (you will see "No new data" in the message box) either because your internet connection is down or slow, or the new numbers have not been posted yet, the saved previous model or the default model will be used. And it will try to load latest numbers again next time you tap it. It will also tell you the model status when you tap it for the first time of the day.
Thank you very much for checking out Smart Fortune Cookie! Happy playing and good luck!
Disclaimer 1: Neither the author nor Apple assumes any responsibility for the consequences of anyone's use of the numbers generated by the Smart Fortune Cookie App.
Disclaimer 2: This statement is not approved by Apple or powerball.com. It is exclusively based on the author's knowledge (the author holds a PhD degree in computer science specializing in machine learning and data mining), experience, and good faith.
Note 1: The prediction is for the five white ball numbers of the draw of Powerball lottery. The amount of red/power ball numbers is too little to build a nice model.
What's New
Added Mega Millions option. That is, the user can choose to either predict Powerballl or Mega Millions.
Smart Fortune Cookie