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.
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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]
Just a reminder here of this experiment using adversarial techniques to confuse the license plate readers. Just an experiment, may not be legal in all locations, check your local laws.
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?si=nas4dOH4vKyAW_5h
The part that was spun off was "Infrastructure Services" (from the Wiki article.) Outsourcing and operations, not the business consulting organization that provides high level strategy to coding services.
Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens visit Earth and someone on Earth snags a book from them with the title "To Serve Man." The rest of the book is written in the alien language. Everyone is excited because they think it means "we are here to serve you to make your lives better." At the end of the episode someone figures out the book is a recipe book about how to cook humans.
If you look around the table and don't know who the mark is it's probably you.
"we built a tool using other people's copyrighted content and now they're suing us and want to know how much use the customers of our "other people's content" tool made of the copyrighted content we used to train the model. Thank you for your attention and outrage over this matter."
Silicon Graphics was still viable in 2006, mostly used for engineering (and maybe video production) graphics. Sun and IBM also competed in this space. SGI went bust in 2009 due to competitive pressures from Windows/x86 workstations. 2006 was probably the last hurrah for this type of workstation.
These look like pre-computer analog control rooms at large plants everywhere. There wasn't much automation then so the operators really had to know the process and how to manually start, stop and modify the behavior of whatever it was - chemicals, power, steel, etc..
There's an interesting parallel here by Nassim Taleb, author of several books the most famous of which might be The Black Swan. In this article, a chapter from an in-progress book, he contends that the most intolerant faction will eventually come to dominate. In the article he's talking about extremist Muslims but it could just as easily be extremist Christians or extremist white nationalists.
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]