What's New On These Pages: July 2003

Next month: August 2003

• Friday 18th July
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Monday 14th July
  Duly posted my subscription renewal form back to Camelot - should get the Subscription Certificate confirmation in a couple of weeks.

• Saturday 12th July
  It was inevitable that eventually the left hand of Camelot would work out what the right hand was doing and withdraw the individual draw sales figures entirely (yes, it's all gone now) from the official Web site in the same manner as they did with their public phone line earlier this year.

  Of course, it's quite straightforward to "reverse engineer" the main and Extra draw sales figures to within a few pounds because they have set formulae for calculating the prize amounts based on, amongst other things, that draw's sales. Since we know all the other variables in the formulae, it's not rocket science to code up something that will come up with the now-elusive ticket sales figure.

  For the main draw, I just opted for a simple "homing in" method. Basically, I used the code that told me how much each tier was wrong by, totalled up that and then added it (complete with sign, it might be too much) to the initial guess and then recursed until all the tiers worked out. However, this will only you to within about a £2 accuracy.

  The Extra draw's jackpot is simply the previous draw's rollover amount plus 45% of the ticket sales of the latest draw, so it's expressed as (round the sales value up):

  Extra sales = (latest jackpot-previous jackpot rollover)/0.45
  

  Again, the accuracy is to within about £2.

• Friday 11th July
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's "combined" rollover and Super Draw (which Camelot rounded up to £18m nicely for us). Also received my annual subscription renewal form, which I'll post out with a cheque for £208. Mind you, the form came with some tatty rules and regs sheets of paper that had been badly (at a slant) photocopied ! Normally, you get an original fold-out colour booklet...Camelot trying to save money ?

• Friday 4th July
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover.

Previous month: June 2003

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