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"Tipton’s extra lines of code first checked to see if the coming lottery drawing fulfilled Tipton’s narrow circumstances. It had to be on a Wednesday or a Saturday evening, and one of three dates in a nonleap year: the 147th day of the year (May 27), the 327th day (Nov. 23) ...

or the 363rd day (Dec. 29). Investigators noticed those dates generally fell around holidays — Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — when Tipton was often on vacation. If those criteria were satisfied, the random-number generator was diverted to a different track. Instead,..

the algorithm would use a predetermined seed number that restricted the pool of potential winning numbers to a much smaller, predictable set of numbers."