I'm going to have to agree with you on that, especially after seeing the winning number selection method.

I am *not* a specialist in the area but I know a thing or two about randomness.

Having people shout out pseudo random numbers is not a good idea, most numbers will be heavily biased, then adding them up makes no sense at all since that does not affect the modulo in a significant way. At least multiply them or something.

Now why I am even talking about improving the algorithm when www.random.org exists, of course that would put the pressure on trusting whoever goes to that site to generate numbers.

Designing a solid way of generating random numbers that is totally unbiased and tamper proof is not easy, I have given it some thought and come up with a process that gives good numbers and is verifiable.

1. Use external source for random seed, real loto for example
2. Concat the numbers as seed for a mersenne-twister
3. If they have some extra numbers, multiply them and discard that many random numbers
4. Get random numbers

This would mean tying up the timing to some real world event, locking entries before numbers are picked. It would also mean that we could all verify the results by knowing the source of the seed and the algorithm.

Python 3.2 example code:

import random
def Generate(seed, discard, players, n):
    random.seed(seed)
        for i in range(0, discard):
            random.randint(1, players)
        for i in range(0, n):
            print(str(i) + " " + str(random.randint(1, players)))

Used like this if numbers were 3, 8, 11, 13, 22, 27, 35 + 7, 24 (Finnish lottery row week 38)
players 42 and prices 3

Generate(381113222735, 7*24, 42, 3)
0 10
1 7
2 31

sure this was just a quick example, for instance the above code can produce duplicate numbers. If that is an issue then you should just fix that.