🔮 QLoto 🎲⚛️

QLoto guarantees a win.

Two small caveats:

1. The winning copy of you is not, strictly speaking, this copy of you.
2. The other copies still have to pay rent.

We consider these engineering concerns and leave them to future work.

QLoto is a terminal app that pulls randomness from three independent public sources and uses it to draw lottery grids for your favourite games. It fetches from every provider on each generation so that, on the Everettian branches where one provider lags or fails, you still walk away with grids from the others.

Philosophical Rationale — A Gentle Many-Worlds Apology

Buying a lottery ticket with pseudo-random picks is, statistically, a donation to the operator. Buying one with quantum randomness, however, is a donation to every version of you that exists across the wavefunction.

Under the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, every measurement of a genuinely quantum source (photon arrival at a beam splitter, vacuum field fluctuations sampled at ANU, the beacons decohered at NIST and CURBy) causes the universe to branch. Each branch hosts a different you, holding a different ticket. Somewhere in that superposed multiverse, one of you wins the jackpot — which is what we mean, above, when we promise a guaranteed win.

Run

uv run python -m qloto

Requires Python 3.11+ and uv. No external Python dependencies beyond the standard library.

Controls

• ↑ / ↓ — switch game
• ← / → (or − / +) — change grids-per-provider (default: 1)
• Enter (or g) — generate a fresh grid from every provider in parallel
• r — refresh (alias for generate)
• q — quit

Included Games

• EuroMillions — 5 numbers from 1–50, 2 Lucky Stars from 1–12
• Swiss Loto — 6 numbers from 1–42, 1 Lucky Number, 1 Replay digit
• Lotto 6aus49 — 6 numbers from 1–49, 1 Superzahl
• Powerball — 5 numbers from 1–69, 1 Powerball 1–26

Randomness Providers

Each press of g fetches from every provider in parallel spirit (sequentially in practice) and produces a grid per provider. Branches where a provider is unreachable simply surface the error next to that provider's slot; the others continue unfazed.

• ANU Quantum Numbers — quantum vacuum fluctuations measured at the Australian National University. Raw uint16 samples are consumed directly. https://qrng.anu.edu.au/
• CURBy (CU Randomness Beacon) — the University of Colorado Boulder's publicly auditable beacon. We hash the canonical payload locally to derive a deterministic seed without assuming a particular field layout. https://random.colorado.edu/
• NIST Randomness Beacon — NIST's public beacon of high-quality random numbers, timestamped and signed. Seed derivation is the same canonical-JSON hash as CURBy. https://beacon.nist.gov/

CURBy and NIST publish ~32 bytes per pulse, so QLoto extends the seed on demand with SHA-256(seed ‖ counter) inside its ByteStream. That keeps uniform sampling (via rejection) while still anchoring every branch of the draw to the original quantum-derived seed.

Disclaimers

• This is not a gambling strategy. In this branch of the wavefunction, your expected return on any ticket remains whatever the operator's payout table says it is, which for most national lotteries is considerably less than the ticket price. Better randomness cannot improve negative-expectation games.
• Nothing here constitutes financial advice. If you are spending money you cannot afford to lose on lottery tickets, please stop. For support: begambleaware.org (UK), ncpgambling.org (US), spielen-ohne-sucht.ch (CH), or your local equivalent.
• No warranty of quantumness. QLoto trusts the providers' published methodologies. If ANU, NIST, or CURBy were compromised upstream, so are the bytes QLoto feeds into your grids.
• No affiliation with ANU, NIST, CU Boulder, CURBy, or any lottery operator.

Acknowledgments

This project would not exist without the people who operate public randomness services for anyone to consume free of charge:

• The ANU Quantum Optics Group for running the world's most widely-used public QRNG for more than a decade. https://qrng.anu.edu.au/contact/
• The CURBy / CU Randomness Beacon team at the University of Colorado Boulder for their publicly auditable beacon. https://random.colorado.edu/
• NIST for the Randomness Beacon project. https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beacons
• Hugh Everett III, posthumously, for the cosmological loophole that makes the "guaranteed win" claim technically defensible.

Please respect each provider's rate limits and terms of use. If you build on top of QLoto, consider citing the upstream beacon you rely on.