How to predict lottery numbers

On Wednesday magician Derren Brown predicted the lottery numbers in the British “Midweek Lotto Draw”. Last night he “revealed” how he did it or did he?

Derren Brown used “an ancient, powerful and beautiful secret, that can only be used when people get together.” He gathered 24 people, that studied the numbers from last year’s lottery draws. Each of them then wrote their predictions down on a piece of paper.

Brown then took the first number from the 24 people, added them together and divided by 24. He did the same with the five remaining numbers. The result were the numbers seen on television Wednesday evening.

According to Derren Brown, this trick won’t work if your actions are motivated by numbers. So if you plan on gathering 24 friends and doing the same thing, it probably wouldn’t work.

Now I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t work on lottery numbers. Sure if you were to guess the weight of a cow at some farmers market, and told 24 people to write down their guess and take the average of their guesses, you would probably get it right, but this is something else.

I smell help of technology, touch screens and computers. What do you think?