
The Zero-Armed Bandit - Thorondor
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/
======
zaroth
Amazing that it took basically a confession to find these guys, what a
different world it was 35 years ago.

Reminds me of the YouTube video on never talking to the police. A key tactic
being to get you to say even one tiny little lie, if they can disprove
anything you said, however irrelevant to the case, you've committed a serious
felony and are now their pawn.

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mikehawkins
My friend is a prosecutor and said basically the same thing. She recommended
that any time the police read your rights and just want to ask you questions -
immediately ask for a lawyer. Just keeps things much, much simpler for you.

~~~
duaneb
Not everyone can afford the time or money invested in such an interaction. It
is very, very valuable to understand your rights yourself.

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klez
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9725851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9725851)
(two weeks ago)

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ekarulf
I was really hoping for an retrospective about a multi-armed bandit learning
algorithm that ran in production but never experimented, effectively yielding
a "zero-armed bandit".

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mizzao
Wow. Giving understandable instructions is important.

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batguano
I had never heard of this. Fascinating.

This is why I read HN!

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userbinator
_Bureau agents acknowledge that it is unlikely that even modern bomb squads
and technology could make much headway disarming Big John 's improvised
explosive without setting it off._

Any (3D?) imaging technology that would allow seeing inside the upper box with
enough resolution to determine the wiring?

Also:

 _The inside surfaces of the boxes were lined with rubber sheeting, which were
in turn lined with conductive foil. If something metal such as a drill bit or
saw blade penetrated the outer metal casing and the rubber sheeting, it would
close a circuit between the metal housing and the foil._

How about cutting tools made of non-conductive materials?

~~~
evan_
The best bet might have been to freeze the battery so it couldn't set off the
blasting caps. Possibly by pouring liquid nitrogen into the top box through
the panel with the switches.

~~~
PanMan
Would liquid nitrogen trigger the float switch?

~~~
bkcooper
If you got enough liquid in there, yes, but I think it's really unlikely you'd
get that far. Until you've cooled things down, the liquid you put in is going
to boil off, which has a corresponding volume expansion of almost three orders
of magnitude. Without good ventilation (which you're not going to get if
you're not cutting into the box because of the contact switches) this is going
to lead to an explosive pressure buildup in the box, which seems like a really
bad idea under the circumstances. There are lots of other possible ways for it
to go wrong, e.g. the wires could break under thermal stress, which might lead
to bad things; the boiloff could disturb the pendulum in the tilt sensor; etc.

~~~
evan_
Yeah, and there was allegedly a pressure sensor in there too, which could trip
it when the gas expands. Tricky.

Maybe they could have tried to deplete the battery somehow? This is all
academic of course.

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liquidcool
Think of the ingenuity in crafting the device, and his business savvy to go
from landscaper to millionaire (in the 70s). So much drive, and yet not enough
to get himself to a GA meeting. Addiction's a bitch.

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FeepingCreature
Could they just have put a box over it and then covered it in concrete? First
thing that comes to mind, not sure why it wouldn't work.

~~~
jacquesm
One way to turn a crappy bomb into a really powerful one is to constrain it in
something that can be fractured.

There are 'blast blankets' used in demolition and highway construction that
are balasted but still open enough that the explosion itself can vent.
Basically the effect is to reduce the slope of the build-up of pressure which
significantly reduces the amount of damage an explosion will do.

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knodi123
If I could talk to the bomber, I'd want to know- why actually use explosives?
At the moment the main explosion goes off, your plot is over and your bomb is
useless. At that point, you're not getting any money, and it's now a question
of "will you get caught by the feds". And if you do get caught, having used
dud explosives can only be to your benefit.

~~~
slazaro
My guess is that maybe dogs can sniff the device and check whether it's
actually TNT or dynamite.

~~~
gwern
You only need enough to make the dog alert, which is not much at all. Dogs
don't weigh, they detect.

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mordrax
He never saw his sons again... He died of liver cancer at the Southern Nevada
Correctional Center

This makes me sad. No matter what you did in life, all the ups and downs you
go through, to die alone like this...

 _spoiler_... Honestly, I read up to the climax believing it was a hoax, never
thought for a moment it was actually a real bomb! Here's a thief, decieve and
steal. What good is it too have a armed bomb in the box.

~~~
logfromblammo
The extortion demand was for $3M. The repair bill was $18M. The bio of the
mastermind stated that he lost significant amounts of money gambling at that
exact casino.

This suggests that the bomber was motivated as much by the casino not having
that money as he was in getting it for himself. Not only did he have motive to
use an actual, armed bomb, but he might have also included some form of
secondary, such as incendiaries, to start fires in the damaged structure and
make it a total loss rather than repairable.

~~~
ryandrake
I'm actually kind of amused by that. All the stubborn casino owner had to do
was pay the guys off and hope the cops finally caught up to them. But pride
and "acting on principle" ended up costing him an extra $15M.

~~~
mordrax
hindsight's a bitch, there's a reason why the US govt doesn't negotiate with
terrorists and the like. Plus they had gone past the 24hr mark and so ppl had
more unanswered questions.

Having said that, what were they expecting to come out of putting fake money
in the bag!!! Had everything gone to plan, and the bomb was real, the result
would have been the same!

~~~
logfromblammo
If you pay the Danegeld, you will never be rid of the Dane.

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stillsut
"American Hustle" meets "Speed", coming Summer 2017 no doubt.

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wtbob
_sigh_ , yet another site which needlessly doesn't work without JavaScript.
It's a pity, because the article itself is great.

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mordrax
I don't get it, the first time I heard this, I thought it was some big joke,
but there really are ppl with js turned off? In 2015? Don't you need it to
sign into anything... like HN? Or post a comment.

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sbierwagen
HN doesn't depend on any clientside JS.

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mordrax
you're right and that's pretty cool, looks like everything's statically
served, simple html

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MaulingMonkey
Well, generated server-side at least.

