Quote - The randomness in lottery machines comes from a whole barrel load of (what are essentially) chaotic effects.

To truely reproduce even a single draw you'd need to account for local changes in air density, air currents, tiny variations of gravity, atomistic scale flaws on all the surfaces of the machine, the balls etc.
The problem is of course you can't because attempting to measure some of these will be in the realm of the Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle.

So while you could simulate a draw, you'll never be able to do so in a predictive way.

I'm sure you're right, and I wasn't suggesting that this would be a practical way to generate random numbers.  I was thinking that maybe the best way to compute randomness would be by trying to simulate the way it occurs in the real world, rather than through calculations that creates a set of differences for their own sake.