Questions have been raised about a lottery in the Philippines in which an incredible 433 people hit the jackpot. The winning combination needed for the $4 million prize of the Grand Lotto last weekend was made up of a series of six numbers which were all divisible by nine. Philippines senate minority leader Koko Pimentel said the highly irregular outcome was “suspicious” and called for an investigation. By the calculations of one mathematician, on the assumption that 10 million bets were placed in the lottery, the chances of having 433 jackpot winners was “one out of one followed by 1,224 zeros,” the BBC reports, adding that the number of molecules in the known universe is a figure that has a mere 80 zeros. However Terence Tao, a math professor at UCLA, said that “it would not be surprising that every few decades, one of these lotteries would exhibit an unusual pattern.”
