Some points on the above computerised system.
Well, firstly the reason why they changed. There are over 6,000 prizes per week, and under the old manual system it would have taken perhaps a minute to draw each number, and extra numbers need to be drawn,.. so it would take perhaps 6000 minutes to carry out, or one hundred hours. This is quite a long time, and is hardly practicable
Problems with the new system.
The bonds have two values.. 6.25 and 6.35.. each bond has a chance of winning in proportion to the capital paid, i.e in proportion to the value. This is very complicated as the higher value bonds have a chance of 1.016 in proportion to the lower values.
The seed of the random number generator is drawn by lot, but no info on how many digits it has etc etc. No info on the pseudo random number generator itself. Could it contain bugs?.. who knows? Personally I'd expect so, and this is based on an understanding of how these thing work.. just read up on RNGs on Wikipedia for examples of complex problems that can occur.
No hardware RNG... this is a problem in my view. If the seed chosen was the same then I believe the same bond numbers would be output... so effectively the seed number chosen is responsible for the entire draw.
This sentence, from the above quote..
..and the order in which the bond serial numbers are generated shall be mixed under a password-controlled software command;
.. makes no sense to me, can anyone make sense of it? If you were a computer programmer and this was in the spec what would you do?.. I don't understand it. What does it mean to 'mix' an 'order'?.. (The order was already specified earlier, so why more instructions as to the order?)
Also, this next bit is quite incredible.., again from the above quote.
...for the purposes of maintaining secrecy in relation to the draw,...
What???? The draw is designed to be secret???? This is unbelieveable I think, surely the opposite should be the case, the draw should not be secret? I find it quite incredible.. who are they maintaining secrecy from?, the paying customers?, is that fair?
One point though in the customers favour is this..
same as the computer drawing page said:
11. (1) The number of prizes and the amount of each prize to be awarded to bonds selected for prizes in a draw shall be determined by the Operator with the approval of NTMA provided always that the total amount made available for the payment of prizes generally shall not in any event be less than the amount of interest payable on all bonds outstanding.
This means that the number of prizes is more than fair... i.e there will always be a final 75 Euro prize, even if that means the total prize fund is over 3.0%, or the current applicable interest rate. .. this is because not to have a final 75 Euro prize would result in total amount of prizes being less than the interest payable, which isn't allowable 'in any event;... But have they implemented this correctly?.. who knows, as the software is secret.
Cheers