In the history of lottery prediction, there has been a British illusionist Derren Brown who successfully predicted which six numbers would come out of the lottery machine. He guessed the numbers to be - 2, 11, 23, 28, 35 and 39 – and amazingly, it was totally correct. It had invited a lot of speculation what helped him in making the correct prediction on the drawing results.

Finally, Brown revealed his secrets in which he could finally guessed the correct balls to come out in the lottery. He said he simply asked a group of 24 people to guess first. However, he also mentioned that those 24 people had to clear their minds from any hopes of winning before. They then had to write down which 6 numbers would be the results of the lottery drawing. He called the method as the unconscious ‘automatic drawing’. He finally obtained the numbers for each by adding up all the 24 guessing and then divided by 24. It means that he got the mean of the numbers guessed by the 24 people in the group.Brown said he followed the technique of the Wisdom of the Crowds.

This theory was mentioned in a book written by James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The book, which was published in 2004, suggests that the decision or prediction can be better made by a group of people than by an individual even by an expert. As one classic illustration in the book, there was a statistician named Francis Galton who got surprised by the correct guess made by the big number of people in a county fair in Plymouth in 1906. The group consisted of 800 people who joined a contest to estimate an ox’s weight. He then added up all the guesses made and counted the mean number and surprisingly, this was the closest guess to the correct answer.

Despite the explanation made by Brown a week after he successfully stunned the viewers with his accurate guess, some experts still couldn’t accept the tricks he declared. A professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford called it as mathematically ‘complete rubbish’ and another professor of Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, David Spielgelhalter added that there was a difference between guessing the weight of an ox and guessing lottery balls. He said that lottery balls certainly couldn’t be predicted. Some others also called his explanations to the tricks were disappointing and ridiculous. There are many other theories speculated to be the tricks used by Brown. One of them is the one that he used split screen trick or false wall.

Although his successful trick in guessing the lottery numbers drawn has reaped many negative feedbacks from the skeptics, on the other hand some people still find his trick interesting and entertaining. In future, we may find other people who can apply the same Wisdom of Crowd theories to predict other lottery results. There should also be more researches conducted to check if this will really help participants in a lottery to correctly select the numbers to win any prizes in a lottery game.