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I'm a student of languages, not math, so forgive the naivete of this question, please.

I bought two lottery tickets back-to-back from the same machine:

39 50 52 56 66 14  
08 39 51 63 66 02

Would two matching numbers 39,66 and the contiguous sequence 50-51-52 be the kind of thing that shouldn't occur if the generated numbers were being generated "randomly"? My intuition is that a certain degree of what might look like repeating patterns is to be expected in a random sequence, but this seems a little much.

Tim
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    How many numbers does this lottery allow ? – Peter Jul 12 '16 at 18:04
  • No, they are as random as any other set of numbers (think of them as different shapes (the numeric quantity of each element is absolutely meaningless here)). – barak manos Jul 12 '16 at 18:25
  • first five numbers (1 to 75); final number (1 to 15); numbers cannot repeat; once used in a given "column" it is removed from the pool of possible numbers. – Tim Jul 12 '16 at 18:44
  • The human (and perhaps animal) brain is very good at "seeing" patterns that are not necessarily there. It can be a useful survival device. One can conclude little or nothing from such a small sample. – André Nicolas Jul 12 '16 at 18:53
  • The probability that from the $5$ numbers, two or more coincide, is about $0.033$, so this event occurs in $1$ out of $30$ cases. Surprising, but not a reason to doubt the randomness. I have not calculated, how likely the other event is. – Peter Jul 12 '16 at 19:05
  • Thanks, Peter. Is the probability that a number will be immediately "adjacent" double the probability that the numbers will coincide, since there are two adjacent possibilities? – Tim Jul 12 '16 at 19:36
  • ... excluding the upper and lower bounds, that is, 1 and 75, which have only one adjacent possibility? – Tim Jul 12 '16 at 23:02

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