Poisson Distribution: Flush fish?

By Philip Dace, John Bream and Malcolm Guppy
Address withheld.

Introduction

Lady Luck, it seems, has a lot to answer for. Not only does she ensure that my football team continually ruin their promising first half display, but she also continues to wreck my weekend by making sure that not even a single one of my lottery numbers comes up… But all may not be lost. Here we report, for the first time, the use of fish to predict lottery numbers, thus cheating Lady Luck, stealing victory from right under her beautiful nose, and winning millions.

Everyone has their own particular way of picking lottery ticket numbers. Perhaps you use a favourite number, a birthday, a memorable date, maybe you even use a shiny pin or a lucky dip. Not known for their skill when it comes to counting (Gadagkar 1995), learning or memory - in fact, a memory of several seconds at best is described by Hughes & Blight (1999), the humble goldfish has been unfortunately overlooked as a predictive tool in the past, until now.

Methods

During a visit to a pet shop, we observed goldfish (Carassius auratus). Goldfish are ideal for research of this kind, because they are gold and have inbuilt scales, removing the need to weigh them before experimenting. They looked nice, and so we chose six at random. All goldfish were kept in glass bowls and water was added. The fish seemed happy, so we set to work.

On lottery mornings all fish were observed one after the other in a random order. Each fish’s accumulated number of gulps over each ten-second stretch was noted for a random minute*. After counting, the fish were fed and watered, and left to relax. On rollover days, one fish was selected at random for another random minute, because we had lots of research council cash to spend.

The chosen numbers (Figure 1) were taken to the nearest newsagent, and six tickets were purchased, along with a bottle of vodka, 40 cigarettes, and 4 bags of crisps to boost moral. Winnings were collected the following morning (hangover depending) and recorded over the duration of the study. We investigated a secondary project halfway through the main study; some extra fish were flown in to live in tanks of vodka, to ascertain the effect of alcohol on fish choish.

* A random minute being the time equivalent to a country mile.

Results

Over the 52 lottery evenings of the study period, a total of £319 was spent on tickets, and about £1155 on booze, fags and food.

The six fish won a total of £15,153,972. This comprised of two jackpot wins (all 6 numbers), 3 sub-jackpot wins (5 numbers plus the bonus ball), 5 five-number wins, 29 four-number wins, and 70 three-number wins. See Figure 2 for a graphical summary. Total profit (after removal of ticket costs, and human necessities) was £15,152, 498. Time well spent.

Figure 2. Summary graph of fishes’ winning numbers
* result from the alcohol experiment which was later discontinued, for obvious reasons.

The short-lived vodka project (after Ryback 1969; 1970) seemed to reduce the fishes’ ability to think clearly about their choice of numbers, as well as decreasing coordination, reaction time,

dulling the senses and blocking memory - all common traits of alcohol intoxication. In fact, this part of the study did not produce very much at all, some fish forgot to gulp, others were pitching, yawing and rolling like there was no tomorrow - for some fish, there was no tomorrow. This avenue of study was discontinued with only a few data points having been collected.

Discussion

Discussion of research such as this is always tricky, due to the sensitive nature of animal experimentation, the dangers of activist activity and the problems associated with interpretation of the behavioural ecology of pisciforms. So to minimise such problems, we decided to talk to several eminent colleagues. Unknown to all except those hard-core fish ecologists, the worldwide centres for excellence in goldfish studies happen to be located in the Seychelles, Maldives, French Polynesia, Hawaii, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and Malaysia - these locations required detailed analysis which set us back 16 months.

Having returned with a new outlook (as well as a new car, house and identity) we decided that it didn’t matter about the results, it was all about the money. We agreed to prepare a new paper entitled; “Can money buy you happiness?” - we expect research on this to take some time.

Acknowledgements

This work was entirely funded by Goldie, Rusty, Moby, Wonda, Fizz and Mavis, and the authors are very grateful for the generous award made by them for future research. The goldfish have now retired, and were last seen in a £1m penthouse pond in Westminster, surrounding spectacular views of the Thames. Neither they, nor us wish to be contacted.

References

Gadagkar, R. (1995). Can animals count? Current Science 68, 1180-1182.

Hughes, R.N. and Blight, C.M. (1999). Algorithmic behaviour and spatial memory are used by two intertidal fish species to solve the radial maze. Animal Behaviour 58, 601-613.

Ryback, R.S. (1969). The use of goldfish as a model for alcohol amnesia in man, Quarterly Journal Studies on Alcohol 30, 877-882.

Ryback, R.S. (1970). The use of fish, especially goldfish, in alcohol research. Quarterly Journal Studies on Alcohol 31, 162-166.