Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
nautil.us
nautil.us
Submitted by pg ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395.
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.
[1] https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=obj...
[2] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon...
I’ve often wondered why this book isn’t better known. I would recommend it.
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).
It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8 'Beat the Wheel'
A Man for All Markets (by Edward O. Thorp) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733505-a-man-for-all-m...