It would appear that they do still use the balls in a tumbler. You can watch the draws online, here is a link for the draw in question

In terms of the physical properties of the balls, it would only really make a difference if the same set was used each time. If they use a new set each time (or change them with reasonable frequency) then you would not be able to find patterns caused by uneven wear or the likes. I guess you might find something with manufacturing quality or perhaps the weight differences by variable amounts of printing on the surface. I’d imagine even if you were able to glean some kind of advantage from this kind of analysis it would be extremely slight and quite an expensive endeavour to try get anything out of it.

That’s just pure statistics, nothing AI could make better unless it wasn’t actually truly random, lol.

It would be thrown off by unfairness, but statistics can identify that too much more easily.

I was just about to post the same video Toby

If the universe is a mathematical object, then perhaps it’s only a matter of time? In fact I think we are so primitive in what we know, that (if as a species we survive) in just one thousand years people will look back at us now in a similar way as we look at early humans of 200,000 years ago or even our closest relatives of a couple million - the pace of advancement is going to speed up exponentially imo.

But maybe that’s a topic for another thread