Do Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Merlin Have Favourite Numbers? UK Lotto's Draw Machines, 1994-2026

On 19 November 1994 a machine called Guinevere drew the first numbers of Britain's National Lottery: 30, 3, 5, 44, 14 and 22, bonus ball 10. A Guinevere made in 1994 is now in the collection of London's Science Museum, name plaque and all, which lists it in its mathematics gallery. Its colleagues were called Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin, later joined by Galahad and Vyvyan.

With the names came a suspicion that keeps resurfacing: that one machine, or one set of balls, favours certain numbers. Checking it needs two facts per draw that most archives don't keep - which machine ran and which ball set was in it. The operator shows them on its results pages, but only for recent draws. Two private results sites list them all the way back to the first draw. We checked the more complete one against our own data, the operator's pages and the other site, then tested every machine on its own.

The log belongs to Richard K. Lloyd, who runs an unofficial National Lottery site at lottery.merseyworld.com. It covers all 3,218 Lotto draws up to 24 October 2026. Since June 2026 every draw has two rounds, so that makes 3,258 rounds. In every one of them the date, the six numbers and the bonus ball match our own archive. The machine names fall into a clear sequence:

Scan the table for outliers and one row jumps out. In the 6/59 years the 2009 Guinevere drew 49 and 54 no fewer than 39 times each, against an expected 26.0 - half as often again as they should. Those look like favourite numbers. It isn't, because with 59 candidates some number is always the most frequent. We simulated 256 fair 6/59 draws 20,000 times: the most frequent number came up 38 times in the typical run, and 39 times or more in 35 per cent of them. Two numbers both reaching that mark is rarer, about 6 per cent of runs. But look through 15 machines and something that rare is likely to turn up somewhere. The test that weighs all 59 numbers together puts Guinevere at 0.11 - nothing unusual.

It's the same trap as with "overdue" numbers: pick the most striking value after the fact and forget how many you looked through to find it. Our UK Lotto statistics page shows how often every number has come up since 2015, with the same warning.

Finding nothing doesn't prove every machine was perfect. It means any tilt would have had to be too small to show in a few hundred rounds. How small? After 256 rounds of 6/59, a single number's count wanders by about 4.8 either side of its expected 26.0 through chance alone. For a test at the 5 per cent level to notice it at all, it would have to come up about 36 per cent more often than fair - and since you are checking 59 numbers at once, more than that. A gross fault would have shown; a subtle one would not.

The second limit is the data itself. For the 51 draws from 2 May to 24 October 2026 (91 rounds) we could compare the log with the operator's results pages. The numbers matched throughout. But in seven rounds from May and June 2026 the log says "Lancelot" where the operator says Lotto 6 or Lotto 1, and for 22 August 2026 it gives ball set 4 for both machines, while the operator lists set 3 for one of them. We corrected those eight entries before testing. For the decades before, there is no official list, but there is a second site: for 80 randomly chosen draws from 1995 to 2026, lottery.co.uk names the same machine and the same ball set every time, and it doesn't share the 2026 errors. Occasional wrong labels would blur a real tilt a little, but they wouldn't make a large one disappear.