How to win the Lottery with R

Firstly don't play the lottery! You're not going to win but I guess with lottery fever gripping the nation, the Euromillions jackpot is a 12X rollover standing at £154 million, this is as good a time as any to put R to one of its more practical uses. Choosing random lottery numbers.

Firstly don't use rnorm as it won't give you whole numbers instead use sample like i've set out below. You can also use it on other data not just numbers but that's outside the scope of this post.

sample(what we're sampling from in this case numbers 1 to 50, how many samples you want to take ie 5, whether you want to pick the same thing more than once being a lottery we don't)

For the Euromillions you need to sample twice once for the main numbers. 5 numbers between 1 and 50 and then again for the 2 stars. 2 numbers between 1 and 11. Anyway this is how to do it.

> lotto<-sample(1:50,5,replace=F) 
> lotto2<-sample(1:11,2,replace=F)
> lotto [1] 16 17  4 49 30
> lotto2 [1] 5 1

So will this actually help you to win the lottery? Alas not but by using random numbers you're less likely to choose a common combination of numbers and have to share the jackpot with all the other punters who love to use 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and other similar common numerical choices.

More on choosing random numbers in R and in the VERY unlikely probability you do win you may need this Stuff Rich People Love