
Could Google Glass be banned in the casinos? - milanvrekic
http://milanvrekic.com/could-google-glass-be-banned-in-the-casinos
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njloof
Seeing as they can ban you for using your brain to count cards, I'm pretty
sure they'll ask you to take off your nerd glasses.

Edit: Also, hackers were doing this stuff while Milan Vrekic was eating
Cheerios. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie>

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milanvrekic
Very cool :) Thanks for the link

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rudiger
Programming Google Glass to play blackjack (basic strategy or a card-counting
system) seems like a much more tractable problem. Watch the table, count the
cards and recommend the optimal play.

I believe these sorts of wearable computing devices are already banned in most
casinos.

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milanvrekic
I wonder what are the policies for cell phones?

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georgemcbay
You can have a cell phone in your pocket but they won't let you use it for
anything. I suspect in the era of smartphones that they would completely ban
them from the floor if not for the fact that enforcing that rule would be a
nightmare.

Source: I've absent mindedly taken a call while sitting down at a table in Las
Vegas and got an instant warning from the dealer.

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theevocater
I think that is pretty self-evident given that cell phones are banned at any
casino table I've ever been at.

The real question is "Where else they will be banned?" Government buildings?
Court rooms? What if I'm going to the bathroom? Walking down the street and
you see some cops arresting someone? How do wiretapping laws come into play in
public? in private?

And further, what happens when we no longer needs glasses? When this is all
just part of our body?

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rdtsc
> Government buildings?

Many facilities that handle classified data would not allow employees to bring
in cell phones with cameras. So there is (was?) a good market for used brick
Nokia phones in that niche.

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Bartlet
Given that cell phones are banned in casinos (for table games, etc) I think
it's self-evident that Google Glass will also be banned.

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tzs
As far as roulette goes, I believe that casinos changed the rules a long time
ago to require that the bets be placed before the ball is released, after a
group of UC Santa Cruz physics postgrads in the late '70s, early '80s built a
wearable computer that would predict which octant the ball was going to end up
in well enough to give a 44% advantage over the house. See:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons>

What you could still do, though, is use the computer to look for biases in the
wheel. Roulette wheels do not produce uniformly distributed results, and with
enough data you can find bets that give you an advantage.

This was covered in an episode of the wonderful TV series Breaking Vegas (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas> ). Each episode of that series
focused on one person or group that found a way to beat the house. Some
cheated (bribe the dealer, hack the slot machine software, sleight of hand to
alter bets after the outcome is determined), some develop amazing physical
skill ("dice dominators" can throw dice with such precise control over the
initial conditions that they come up with the same outcome each time), one guy
counterfeited casino tokens (and did such a good job that the chip
manufacturer was not able to tell which tokens were his and which were theirs
--they only knew counterfeit tokens existed because more tokens were coming
back when they emptied the slot machines than they had issued), and some (such
as the roulette bias people) exploit the math of the game.

In the episode that dealt with roulette biases, there was a family in Europe
that would observe a wheel for a very large number of plays, taking notes on
the outcomes. The casinos do not object to note taking--they encourage it,
because people taking notes are people who think they have a system, and
99.99% of the time people who think they have a system are people who do not
understand the laws of probability and are going to lose. Well, this family is
not part of the 99.99%. They took their notes, found the favored numbers, and
bet on those, and won big.

The casinos tried moving the wheels between tables, but the family members had
spent so much time looking at the wheels gathering data, they could recognize
the wheels from wear patterns, scratches, and so on, and so still place the
right bets.

The casinos then simply banned them. If they had been playing in Las Vegas,
that would have been the end of it, but they were in Europe. They went to
court--and the court said casinos could not ban people for simply winning too
much. The family had not violated any legitimate casino rules, so the casinos
had to let them back in.

I don't remember how the casinos finally stopped these people--probably by
replacing wheels with ones the family had not seen, or physically altering the
wheels to change the distribution.

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Sambdala
It's been a couple years since I played roulette in the US, but in the
UK/Europe you can definitely still place bets for a few seconds (maybe 5?)
after the ball is released.

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massarog
I've played roulette for the past 2 years at several casinos in the US and you
can still place bets after the ball is released. Once the wheel starts to slow
down and before the ball drops onto the wheel, the dealer will signal no more
bets.

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tekromancr
Holy crap. I was thinking about this very idea a few hours ago. You didnt
happen to be listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe when this idea
came up, did you?

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milanvrekic
Shit, better put my tinfoil hat back on :)

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tekromancr
Creepy!

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chromejs10
They'd have to be. You can't have your cell phone out when you are sitting at
the table, so Glass wont be any better

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Reedx
What will be interesting is what casinos will do when this kind of tech is
embedded in contacts or the eye itself.

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jerf
Fall back to pure chance games. Google Glasses won't help you win slots. (And
should that become untrue, the slots can and will be fixed until it is true
again.)

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waterlesscloud
They'll have to ban them or shut down, so it seems like a pretty obvious
choice.

