Too damn smart. Cut it out.

Apparently, it is now illegal to be super duper smart.

First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot.
The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years.

Harper's reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her 'luck' into question.

First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics.

A professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Mr Rich: 'When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest ‘em first and ask questions later.'

Unless there's something missing in this story (you know, something like actual wrong doing...) the professor at the institute for gambling and commercial gaming is suggesting that people smart enough to figure out really, really, really quite hard math problems should be arrested.

Mr Rich details the myriad ways in which Ms Ginther could have gamed the system - including the fact that she may have figured out the algorithm that determines where a winner is placed in each run of scratch-off tickets.

He believes that after Ms Ginther figured out the algorithm, it wouldn’t be difficult to determine where the tickets would be shipped, as the shipping schedule is apparently fixed, and there were a few sources she could have found it out from.

According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all.
 

The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been 'born under a lucky star', and that they don’t suspect foul play.

What sort of foul play could possibly be involved, other than being super smart and putting it to good use?  I suppose she could have bribed a lotto official, but the immediate assumption that foul play is the best answer to how she pulled this off is weird. To be fair, the lottery is being very decent about this, far more decent than I would have expected from minor functionaries.