201601132259 40t6rg

40t6rg (title 201601132259) has long been filed as "Powerball numbers, community consensus." That reading was half right: the bytes are not the numbers that were drawn, but they have exactly the shape of a Powerball ticket, posted on the afternoon of the record jackpot draw.

The post itself is tiny, 6 bytes:

01111a2d3313

Read byte by byte that's 1, 17, 26, 45, 51, 19.

It is not the drawing's result

Here are the real winning numbers for the 2016-01-13 drawing and its four nearest neighbours:

2016-01-06 (Wed):  2, 11, 47, 62, 63,  PB 17
2016-01-09 (Sat):  32, 16, 19, 57, 34, PB 13   ($900M jackpot)
2016-01-13 (Wed):  4, 8, 19, 27, 34,   PB 10   (the $1.586B record)
2016-01-16 (Sat):  3, 51, 52, 61, 64,  PB 6    (reset to $40M)
2016-01-23 (Sat):  22, 32, 34, 40, 69, PB 19

None of them match. And none could: 40t6rg was posted 2016-01-13 17:59:01 UTC (12:59 ET), while the drawing was at 10:59 PM ET, 2016-01-14 03:59 UTC. The post is nearly 10 hours before the draw, so it cannot be reporting results that didn't exist yet. This is why the original "these are the winning numbers" claim was retracted.

It is a valid ticket

What the retraction never asked is whether the bytes have the format of a Powerball play. They do, exactly:

• five distinct white balls, 1, 17, 26, 45, 51, in strictly ascending order (the way tickets print them), all in the 1–69 range;
• then one Powerball, 19, in the 1–26 range.

Those are the rules that were in force from October 2015. Six random bytes fit that format with probability C(69,5)·26 / 256⁶ ≈ 1 in a million, and this is the only 6-byte post in the whole corpus, so there is no pile of candidates to fish a match out of. The other big US lottery doesn't fit: a Mega Millions play needs its last number in 1–15, and 19 is out of range.

The title fits too. 201601132259 is not the posting time (12:59 ET); 22:59 ET is the drawing's own scheduled time. So the post is a pick for that night's record $1.586 billion drawing, put up about 10 hours ahead of it. A ticket bought before the draw is not expected to match the result, which is exactly what the table above shows.

This puts 40t6rg alongside A858's other topical asides, such as the Washington Post earmarks story in pegdm and the BoRG-58 astronomy news around p5dsk.

Not a gap predictor

40t6rg is also the last post before a 6.1-day quiet stretch (the next post is 41qg94, 2016-01-19). Another short post, ljcad, turned out to encode the exact day its own 42-day silence ended (see that write-up), so I ran the same check here: every contiguous slice of the 6 bytes, both byte orders, as a Julian Day Number and as a day count since the Unix epoch. Nothing lands near either date. The ticket reading stands on its own.

The status here is explained at the format level: the bytes are a well-formed Powerball play for the draw the title names. Whether A858 actually bought that ticket, or why those particular numbers, is not knowable from the post.