Get thee to a lottery, go

Sowe’re back to the monkeys and Shakespeare. As every schoolboy knows, if you were to sit an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite period of time, you’d be doing pretty well.

And as every schoolboy also knows but never quite believes, if you managed to get all the monkeys to start typing, eventually one of them would write Hamlet, complete with ghost, to be or not to be and Polonius stabbed through the arras.

The reason the schoolboy doesn’t quite believe it, however his teachers may bang on about probability theory and the limitlessness of infinity, is that it’s just too improbable to comprehend. Well, that schoolboy needs to get himself to South Africa.

Like everywhere else, South Africa has discovered that an easy way to generate a lot of money from people who don’t have much is to hold a lottery. This South African lottery is run along the same lines as ours, with six numbers drawn at random.

And the numbers that came up lastweek were five, six, seven, eight, nine and – are you listening now, schoolboys? – 10. Whereupon the world, which had hitherto taken no interest whatsoever in the South African lottery, suddenly took a lot of interest.

‘‘How could this be?’’ cried the world as one. ‘‘What are the odds?’’

Well, the odds are easy to calculate. The chance of any particular number being drawn is one in 40. So the chance of any six specific numbers being drawn is one in 40 to the power of six, which is a little over 4 billion. In other words you’d have to run aweekly lottery for roughly 80 million years to be confident of drawing five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 just the once. Something is clearly rotten in the state of South Africa.

And when it was further revealed that no fewer than 20 people had shared the first prize it was clear to every schoolboy on the planet that this whole business was as fishy as a trawler. It smelt to heaven.

Only it didn’t, of course. It was mathematically and ethically odourless. The odds of drawing five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 are indeed 4 billion to 1, but so are the odds of drawing any set of numbers. No set is more probable or improbable than any other, and it therefore follows that no set has any significance. Any apparent significance lies in our perception of the numbers, not in the numbers themselves.

As for there being 20 winners, we should rejoice that there are that many South Africans who paid attention in probability class and acted on that knowledge by choosing a set of numbers that was easy to remember. It’s nice, in this inverted Trumpian world, to see reason rewarded for once.

Why then all the fuss? Why has the story flown around the world and seized the attention of millions? The answer lies in the suggestion of a guiding hand.

Every player knows the chances of winning Lotto are absurdly remote. Nevertheless, at the moment of buying a ticket, all Lotto players hear a wee voice whisper that the universe has singled them out for reward. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary – the sorry bank account, the sorrier bladder – the universe cares for us. As Hamlet put it, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends and also runs the lottery.

Every lottery ticket, then, is a prayer. And five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 is news because it looks like an answer.