The Totally Unscientific Luck Test
Nothing about this quiz is scientific. No control group, no lab coats, no peer review. We asked zero experts and they said nothing, which we took as agreement. What remains is seven questions and a feeling.
Luck cannot be measured, so we are going to measure it anyway. Think back over your history with parking spots, coin flips, and vending machines, then answer honestly. At the end you receive a verdict somewhere between walking rain cloud and horseshoe human, and it will be exactly as accurate as it sounds.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
A miracle a month, mathematically
The Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood offered a tidy piece of arithmetic about surprise. Define a miracle as an event with a one-in-a-million chance. Assume a person is alert and taking in events at something like one a second, for around eight hours a day. That comes to roughly a million events a month, so the average person should expect a miracle at about that rate, purely by counting.
The point is not that wonders are cheap. It is that we register the hit and never tally the misses. Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller gave the formal version in a 1989 paper on coincidences: given a large enough number of opportunities, any specified outrageous thing becomes likely to happen somewhere, to somebody. Lotteries produce repeat winners because millions of people buy tickets over and over, not because those particular people are charmed.
Twenty-three people in a room
The standard demonstration involves birthdays. Ask how many people you need in a room before it is more likely than not that two of them share a date, and most people guess well over a hundred. The answer is twenty-three. The trick is that you are not comparing yourself against everyone else; you are comparing every possible pair, and pairs multiply far faster than heads do.
Once that clicks, everyday luck starts to look different. A run of good mornings is not a signal about anything. Streaks are what random sequences genuinely look like, and it would be far stranger if they never appeared.
The clover is botany, not a judgement
White clover normally produces three leaflets. The four-leaflet form arises from a tendency that is largely recessive and is nudged along by growing conditions, which is why a patch that yields one will often yield several and why people who find them tend to keep finding them. The frequently quoted odds of about one in five thousand come from counting exercises and vary enormously from patch to patch.
So the honest reading is that anyone who finds one was looking carefully at a promising patch. This quiz works on the same principle: no science at all, seven questions, and a ruling delivered with total confidence and no basis whatsoever. Enjoy the verdict. Do not plan around it.
