Inspiration

When news of the latest billion dollar lottery jackpot resurfaced, so did stories of people overextending themselves and their finances in the hopes of winning the jackpot. Relative odds are easy to grasp, if you have two tickets you are twice as likely to win. However, the reality of the overwhelming odds is lost on some people. We hope to correct that.

What it does

Our simulator allows the user to convert the value of their real-world possessions into $2 lottery tickets, and generates the number of tickets they could have bought as well as a winning ticket, and shows the amount of tickets that actually won some kind of monetary prize. It then uses the Mega Million payout system and calculates the total money won or lost as well as the odds of winning the billion dollar Jackpot.

How I built it

Using Java.

Challenges I ran into

We had to implement sets to solve a possible issue of creating duplicate tickets. This led to the use of Global variables and converting an array of winning numbers to a string that could be stored and compared to all the other generated strings. We also needed to convert any single digit number into a two number string to maintain a 12 character string.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The comprehensiveness of the information provided to the user as well as the idea to prevent duplicates using a set of Strings that should be unique from each other.

What I learned

Java sets were new to me and java was overly new to the rest of the team

What's next for Realistic Lottery Simulator

Creating a GUI was the next idea we wanted to implement if there was time available. For now, creating a simple app version available to anyone wants to scratch that itch of compulsively purchasing lottery tickets. Another idea we wnated to implement was a database with average price suggestions that would grow when people added items not located in the database.