Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#2Thorp's paper: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf.
Submitted by pg ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395.
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#3There is a wonderful book about this by Thomas Bass, which I adored as a teenager in the early ’90s. My British copy (which I still have) is entitled The Newtonian Casino, but I gather the original US edition was called The Eudaemonic Pie.
I’ve often wondered why this book isn’t better known. I would recommend it.
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#4Thorp recently wrote a book about his life and work - there's a chapter in there about Shannon and his adventures in the casino. Definitely worth a read.
"A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market"
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#5This video is interesting I thought, on the topic of beating roulette, about the Eudaemons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8 'Beat the Wheel'
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#6Thorp recently wrote a book about his life and work - there's a chapter in there about Shannon and his adventures in the casino. Definitely worth a read. "A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market"
Ed Thorp also wrote the seminal work on card counting, "Beat the Dealer" (1962).
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#7There is a wonderful book about this by Thomas Bass, which I adored as a teenager in the early ’90s. My British copy (which I still have) is entitled The Newtonian Casino , but I gather the original US edition was called The Eudaemonic Pie . I’ve often wondered why this book isn’t better known. I would recommend it.
Cheers, just ordered that :) There seems to be lots of used copies pretty cheap on amazon.
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#8The wearable computer discussed in the article is preserved in the MIT museum. See photo in [1]. Shannon was well known for eccentric pursuits such as juggling and making game machines. I collected a list of the latter at the gaming site BoardGameGeek [2].
[1] https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=obj...
[2] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon...
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#9There is a wonderful book about this by Thomas Bass, which I adored as a teenager in the early ’90s. My British copy (which I still have) is entitled The Newtonian Casino , but I gather the original US edition was called The Eudaemonic Pie . I’ve often wondered why this book isn’t better known. I would recommend it.
You can apparently borrow this book online for 14 days: https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass
It's also available on Kindle for $7.99: https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass-ebook/dp/B... They also have it as an audio book on Audible.
Note: this book is about a different, later group that built a wearable computer to hack roulette rather than Shannon and Thorp. Shannon and Thorp's work is mentioned a bit, but most of the book is about Farmer, Packard and associates, and the Shannon and Thorp work is discussed more as general background to help in understanding Farmer and Packard's work.
Farmer and Packard do not seem to have been aware of any details of Shannon and Thorp's work. They had read Thorp's book on blackjack, and Thorp mentions briefly that he had way to beat roulette but had not implemented it yet. When Packard and Farmer read that, they were skeptical. Later, they independently came up with the idea of using physics to predict roulette, and only after that did they realize that this was what Thorp was getting at, too.
I don't recall anything in the book indicating that they knew Shannon had been involved with Thorp. They made use of Shannon's work in areas such as information theory when trying to understand chaos and apply it to roulette, of course. It has been over 30 years since I read the book, so I possibly missed something (although just before posting this I found my copy and skimmed the first 60 pages, which covered up to where Packard and Farmer got the idea and started working on implementing it).
Re: Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
#10One more tidbit: Professor Arthur Lewbel knew Clause Shannon personally as a fellow member of the MIT juggling club [1]. At one point, he photographed Shannon's "toy room" [2]. In the center photo. is that the $1500 roulette wheel mentioned in the article?
