Hi Stan
The following is an observation based on experience running the Multi Segment filter. For descriptive simplicity I am going to describe the procedure I use. We will also consider just the first 5 columns.
For each column I pick the 5 most likely segments. I use a spreadsheet of 3125 lines to create the csv file. This plays all possible combinations of segments (5^5). For a pick 6/45 game this will take about 5 hours to run on a full package of 8.3 million tickets.
However, if I filter each column consecutively with the five selected filters using the Segment Combination Filter I will have a ticket set of about 800K. If I run the Multiple Segment Filter on this reduced set it will take about one tenth of the time – only 800K iterations instead of 8.3 million – i.e. parse 800k times through 3125 lines instead of 8.3 million.
So, my suggestion is that the Multi Segment Filter be expanded to automatically filter each column of the input array (thereby creating a pre-filtered set of tickets) before being fed into the existing algorithm. The results will be exactly the same. However, there is a substantial saving in run time especially on the large Lotteries.
Just a thought for your consideration.
Bobijohn