Roulette Computers: Hidden Devices That Predict Spins | Hacker News Reader

Roulette Computers: Hidden Devices That Predict Spins

roulette-computers.com

88 pointso4c34 comments

Fun fact: roulette computers were (arguably) the first wearable computer [0] in 1961 and co-invented by Claude Shannon of information theory fame.

[0] https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.014

There were also some early shoe-based devices I have read about, which used earpieces (difficult to avoid breaking the thin wires necessary to hide them, and prevent damage from sweat). Some of these stories unfortunately weren't documented super well -- I think I came across them from the original participants chatting on a long-defunct forum or newsgroup -- but it is mentioned in passing here: https://jimsudmeierstories.com/adventures-with-a-concealed-b...

> Then around 1976 came “David,” using the Z80 microprocessor, oriented towards team play (the Big Player making the big bets) with hand keyboards operated through holes in pockets and transmitters to signal the Big Player. Later came “Thor,” a computer to track the shuffling (and possible clumping) of multiple decks. One of his inventions involved networking players together with fine wires about 3 feet long. Then there were “Magic Shoes” in which 12 batteries, computer, and all were hidden in “Frankenstein” shoes. Later still there was “Narnia, the sequencing computer.”

The inventor Keith Taft talks about it in more detail in an interview here: https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/gambling-with-an-edge/interv...

Yhe initiator of the scheme, Edward O. Thorp, was also a father of modern blackjack card counting, and wrote the definitive book about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#History_of_blackj... . "The Invention of the First Wearable Computer" http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/courses/mobwear/resourc... is Thorp's paper about the blackjack-computer scheme.

(Another famous '70s card counter, Ken Uston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Uston ended up writing one of the very earliest video game guides, Mastering Pac-Man (it came out in 1981, the same year as Tom Hirschfeld's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Master_the_Video_Games .) Apparently one of its readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semyon_Dukach discovered Uston's blackjack books as a result, got into blackjack and so ended up on the later, late-'70s-to-early-2000s MIT Blackjack Team led by J.P. Massar .)

Yes Thorp had secured a hard to schedule meeting with Shannon regarding his research. Turned out Shannon was more interested in the analysis of a few gambling games that Thorp had thrown in the conversation.

The wide interest in things that Shannon held from weird gadgets to possibly the most famous Masters thesis dissertation, Shannon has me in awe and respect. Had he been a good storyteller, I suspect, people would have been as familiar with his name as Feynman.

Thorp is alive and in his 90s.

Here’s an interview with him from a few years ago.

https://youtu.be/CNvz91Jyzbg?si=vR8jxJ7iBCP0uYzk

A great reference, thanks! I can imagine both Thorp and Shannon desperately trying to solder loose wires in a toilet booth could make a great awkward scene in a future film

I read a story one time about a mysterious player who visited the casino one time per month. He would look at the table for many spins, make a single bet, win a small amount and leave. When he entered security was on high alert, they all had their eyes on the monitors, didn't see anything suspicious. When he left they would pull up the footage from his previous visits and examine it again. They did that every month and thought it was hilarious how he came to "steal" something like 50 bucks one time per month and got away with it every time.

Don’t be greedy is probably a good rule when criming. But also, probably testing the system. Who knows who else was using it and how :)

There's a classic book from 1985 about an early, successful attempt to make one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons

The Eudaemons were a small group headed by graduate physics students J. Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard at the University of California Santa Cruz in the late 1970s.[1] The group's immediate objective was to find a way to beat roulette using a concealed computer, with the ulterior motive of using the money made from roulette to fund a scientific community. The name of the group was inspired by the eudaimonism philosophy. .... As a science experiment, the group's objective was accomplished: to prove that there was a way of predicting where a ball would fall in a roulette wheel given input data about the timing of the passage of the ball relative to the wheel.

A previous wearable roulette computer had been built and used in a casino by Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon in 1960–1961, though it had only been used briefly.[2][3]

"Remote Application

The Remote Uber and Hybrid are like a roulette computer in the cloud – it can be applied from anywhere with internet access. You don’t even need to enter a casino. You can have others play for you, who pay you part of their winnings. You determine who accesses your computer and when. The Hybrid computer even allows you to watch your teams play live with a hidden camera."

This whole thing sounds sketchy, but this is particularly sketchy.

> It depends on the computer version. Normal mobile phones cannot accurately process timings, so they are unsuitable for roulette computers. This is why our phones are modified. How we modify each phone depends on the model, but in most cases we install a crystal oscillator that acts as a microprocessor timer, then we re-program the phone firmware to source it’s timings from the new timer. The phone has the timer, custom firmware, and interface software depend on each other. This gives the best combination of accurate timings and complex algorithms to predict roulette spins. The modifications are difficult and expensive, which is why most roulette computers are unmodified phones or PDAs, or microprocessors.

Is it just me or does this sounds more like a justification for the cost and/or to discourage reverse engineering? I'm skeptical this is actually necessary.

Android isn't a real-time OS, but System.Nanotime() works just as well with the built-in timer as an external oscillator.

I suspect they're grabbing a digital input state change interrupt to get some real time processing, if you could get Android to give you access to a timer ISR that would work just as well.

The clicker-type computers that rely on a human input don't need anywhere near the level of precision of hardware interrupts. A software-polled button will be just fine. But even if you did need the interrupts' precision, you can do it on any cheap wireless-enabled microcontroller and then transmit to an app on an unmodified off-the-shelf phone.

This is bullshit and designed to make their devices more advanced that the outdated junk they really are. I also have doubts they work, because if they did it would be in their best interest to keep quiet and not encourage casinos to deploy countermeasures.

That sounds a bit gobbeldygook to me. Its either oversinplification or bs. Install a crystal oscillator? That'a one component of a more complex system...accurate enough timing for this could be achieved with an rc oscillator...and there are already numerous xtals in a phone.

Which "timings" are they talking abt?

Im trying to be charitable...but that desc isnt helping.

Isn't this easily defeated by closing the betting before the wheel starts spinning? Is that not standard practice anyway?

Yes this would defeat it, but standard practice is that you can keep betting a couple rotations into the spin. The reason for that is that some people believe the croupier can target his shot to some extent. (I don't think it's farfetched that someone who spins a ball 8 hours a day could get above chance at targeting.)

I believe the croupiers also have rules on how hard they must throw the ball, in addition to rules that define how long they have between picking up the ball and throwing it. In the first case it’s usually at least 3 full rotations, and in the second case it’s before the spot the ball was pick up from passes their hand.

I don’t think a croupier can meaningfully cheat with these rules, especially since they’re not on the hook for people winning too much. If they could cheat I think most would cheat against the casino.

Leaving the bets open while the ball is spinning causes a lot of players who think they can time the ball (or as another commenter said, believe the dealer might be cheating) to bet and presumably yields higher profits.

There are other countermeasures developed nowadays, such as Cammegh's RRS (Random Rotor Speed): https://www.cammegh.com/our-products/roulette-wheels/mercury... - essentially after bets are closed the wheel is able to ever-so-slightly slow down at random times, throwing off any prior calculation.

It is amusing that casino machines and games (like digital slot machines) are more tightly regulated than voting machines.

I’ve never trusted video slot machines despite regulations.

And even 50 year old computer games generally have better UX.

I don’t have proof to back up my assertion but my gut says a lot of these online/non-us/crypto casinos are cheating. How would you the end user know? The house knows where the big money is placed on the table and then magnetic or some mechanism control where the ball lands. Profit even more than their statistical edge.

I know nothing about the sector and might have butchered some details but I see an interview one time with some professional online gamblers. They all had many millions in many play accounts but took only a tiny amount from each every month much less than the maximum withdraw. Barely enough to live on.

They explained that some games were rigged but still had to give [big] prizes to someone to keep the show going. Some would organize events and send their big players on trips.

Like an open secret no one talked about. The system is this: For a good while keep depositing more money into the account than spend and leave all the winnings. If they are cheating such account will win incremental amounts. Cheating or not they need to show their players are real people periodically so they organize VIP events and send the top players.

When asked if their winnings were real they examine the poker faces around them for a while until one said that it was irrelevant. I wont cash out either way!

If you could find that, I would be really interested to watch it.

> How would you the end user know?

There are "provably fair" schemes where casino reveals a hash of the outcome before players bet.

I am referring to “live” dealers where they spin a actual wheel and ball.

don't gaming commissions perform anonymous audits to make sure your game has the odds it claims to have?

How does that work for a foreign online casino? The entire operation is presumably illegal in most cases.

Yeah I assume that these foreign casinos have pretty weak regulations. In Australia, poker machines are all required to have real-time monitoring software installed and that software can be provided by any vendor, but must be audited by regulators and have remote access allowed.

This is almost certainly unlawful in the UK. Phil Ivey lost a lawsuit just for edge sorting. Introducing a device is far more obviously dishonest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivey_v_Genting_Casinos

I'd never heard of "edge sorting" prior to this comment, but reading the Wikipedia entry for it, it strikes me that the technique relies entirely on the cooperation of the croupier/dealer coupled with inconsistent printing/cutting of the pattern on the rear of the card?

I've not spent a lot of time in casinos, but I am surprised that given the technique is apparently widely known, dealers are not more reluctant to accede to player's requests to rotate a card for "luck" or "superstition", or whatever other rhetorical device is used to convince.

It also seems like simply taking care in the production of the cards and their backing design would afford a significant degree of preventative protection too. Sure it might drive the cost of a pack of cards up given the extra precision needed when printing and cutting the cards, but this does not seem beyond the resources of a casino.

I'd love to see footage of how Ivey manipulating the dealer into rotating cards unfolded.

>>> relies entirely on the cooperation of the croupier/dealer coupled with inconsistent printing/cutting of the pattern on the rear of the card?

AFAIK there wasn't overt cooperation with the dealer. Ivy gave the casino a set of rules he would play by if the casino hosted him. He brought a woman who was an expert in reading the miscut edges of the cards. The "cooperation" was that Ivy demanding the same set of cards (the ones his expert was able to read) were not allowed to be removed from play - that was one of his specific demands, the dealer was merely doing what he was told to do by the casino.

This is what gave him an edge and allowed him to retain it. By not letting the dealer/casino switch decks to one his expert couldn't read, the casino made the case he cheated. Even though, they took his action on the basis of the demands he made - so had Ivy lost a few million, the casino would be trumpeting that they beat one of the greatest card players. When they got took for a ton of money? Then, and only THEN it seems they refused to pay him and the court case ensued.

It always amazed me that even with this weakness, casino card games always use rear art that goes to the edge. While consumer cards often have a white border that would solve the issue entirely.

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