nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest.Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid.
No, under the assumption that there is no benefit at all, including profit, of calculating hashes you will not publish. Unless he was testing the randomness of the algorithm, but I doubt it.
Yes, or testing something else.
We are still in beta, yes? This is all just testing so far.
