How to suppress the output of an mfile?

When I run the code below the line in the for loop 'Unfortunately you didn''t win anything today, try again tomorrow!' isn't suppressed for some reason and is always displayed on the command window. Was wondering how to stop this.

%National Lottery number selector

Player_Numbers = [4 23 27 45 21 33];

numbers = [1:1:59];
Winning_Numbers = numbers(randperm(59,6))

similarity = intersect(Player_numbers,Winning_Numbers);
money = numel(similarity);

if money == 3
    fprintf('Congratulations 3 of your numbers matched, you win £25!\n');
elseif money == 4
    fprintf('Congratulations 4 of your numbers matched, you win £100!\n');
elseif money == 5
    fprintf('Congratulations 5 of your numbers matched, you win £1000!\n');
elseif money == 6
    fprintf('Congratulations all of your numbers matched! You win \n todays jackpot of £1,000,000!\n');
else 
    fprintf('Unfortunately you didn''t win anything today, try again tomorrow!\n');
end

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

Nothing is wrong except the variable "Player_Numbers" mismatches "Player_numbers" with the capital "N".

That is why it is so hard to win the lottery, right?

What do you mean by "isn't suppressed"? The message is printed out on purpose.

[Joshua Papworth]

I want to run this code numerous times (over 1000) so I wondered if there was a way of stopping the code from displaying that message each time- otherwise my command window is spammed with the line.

[Walter Roberson]

Should the other outputs be displayed? Or should they be surpressed as well and only a summary of the winnings be displayed?

[Fangjun Jiang]

You could comment out the whole "fprintf()" line after the "else" line. But then, if you run it 1000 times, you could end up seeing nothing in the command window (because it's unlikely. The odds to match 3 numbers is 1 out of 205379). You might wonder whether your script is correct or not.

[Joshua Papworth]

The other outputs shouldn't be displayed either and only the winnings displayed.

[Walter Roberson]

Fangjun, my modeling suggests a 3 number match about 1.05 percent of the time, and a total matching frequency (any prize) about 1.1 percent. The "expected value" (prize times probability, summed) is running about 31.6 cents per run.

[Fangjun Jiang]

31.6 cents per run?! Great, Walter! I shall keep running the program and waiting for some bit coins coming out :)

1.05 percent of chance to match 3 numbers seems high. What is the formula? I am out of practice on probability. Is it nchoosek(6,3)/nchoosek(59,6)? Which is way samller than 1.05 percent.

[Fangjun Jiang]

All right, you are right, Walter!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

The best approach is to rewrite the code to total the prizes instead of printing each individual success.

But if for some reason you cannot do that, then you can evalc() running the script, capturing the result into a variable. Then count the number of substrings '3 of', '4 of', '5 of', 'all of' and multiply the counts by the relative prizes and total.