Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)(nautil.us)
nautil.us
Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-cheat
19 comments
Thorp's paper: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf.
Submitted by pg ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395.
Submitted by pg ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395.
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 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.
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.
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.
Interesting! I think that’s why we used the Myo - if you wear it under a jacket, you can input (flex your forearm), and receive output (vibrations), while still staying totally discreet.
The 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...
[1] https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=obj...
[2] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon...
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.
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).
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).
Thanks! It’s remarkably reassuring to hear from someone else who remembers it. And thanks for the extra detail.
You can also check out Fortune's Formula, which has a lot of information about Shannon, Kelly and Thorpe.
It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.
It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.
Cheers, just ordered that :) There seems to be lots of used copies pretty cheap on amazon.
Thorp 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).
Just yesterday I finished up a biography of Claude Shannon that I recommend to anyone that ones to learn more. It briefly covers this as well as ton of his other "toys" - https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...
This video is interesting I thought, on the topic of beating roulette, about the Eudaemons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8 'Beat the Wheel'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8 'Beat the Wheel'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
See also the first chapter of Kevin Mitnick's "the art of intrusion", about a group that hacked video poker after reading "the Eudanomic Pie"
A fascinating, related read:
A Man for All Markets (by Edward O. Thorp) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733505-a-man-for-all-m...
A Man for All Markets (by Edward O. Thorp) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733505-a-man-for-all-m...
I've always thought Shannon has been a bit underappreciated as a scientist
[1] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html
[2] https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg