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One 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? [1] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html [2] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg
There 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.
It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.
We used a Myo, which you could wear on your forearm. Every time the ball went past a specific number (00, say), you would flex your arm. At most casinos you can make bets after the ball is “released”, so this was a viable strategy.
Surprisingly, we got it to be fairly accurate! I forgot exactly how accurate - but I think we were able to predict which quadrant the ball would land in - perhaps 60% of the time? If you memorized the order of numbers, I think you could do reasonably well.
We never tried it in Vegas, since we didn’t have much money, so the upside was limited. And like the article says - the downside was unlimited. So the EV was fairly negative for us.
Instead, we tested this on a bunch of roulette videos (from youtube). I think we also considered buying a used roulette wheel from Vegas, but they were very expensive ($10k+).
We didn’t pursue it any further - but I would love to see if somebody can try this again. With a Myo (or perhaps nowadays an Apple Watch), you can do input and output pretty discreetly.
One time at a hackathon a few friends and I tried to game roulette. We got decently far in around 18h. We used a Myo, which you could wear on your forearm. Every time the ball went past a specific number (00, say), you would flex your arm. At most casinos you can make bets after the ball is “released”, so this was a viable strategy. Surprisingly, we got it to be fairly accurate! I forgot exactly how accurate - but I…
One time at a hackathon a few friends and I tried to game roulette. We got decently far in around 18h. We used a Myo, which you could wear on your forearm. Every time the ball went past a specific number (00, say), you would flex your arm. At most casinos you can make bets after the ball is “released”, so this was a viable strategy. Surprisingly, we got it to be fairly accurate! I forgot exactly how accurate - but I…
Went to a couple casinos in Louisiana and they did not allow smart watches to be worn at the table, if they found out they'd request it be taken off or you're removed from the table.
There 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 mention…
A Man for All Markets (by Edward O. Thorp) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733505-a-man-for-all-m...