
Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-cheat
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JoeDaDude
One more tidbit: Professor Arthur Lewbel knew Clause Shannon personally as a
fellow member of the MIT juggling club [1]. At one point, he photographed
Shannon's "toy room" [2]. In the center photo. is that the $1500 roulette
wheel mentioned in the article?

[1] [https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-
lewbel/Shannon.html](https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/Shannon.html)

[2] [https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-lewbel/toys2.jpg](https://www2.bc.edu/arthur-
lewbel/toys2.jpg)

~~~
tyingq
Great find! Wish I had a chance to walk through that you room.

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dang
Thorp's paper:
[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf).

Submitted by pg ten years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148395).

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dvdhsu
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.

~~~
poorleno111
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.

~~~
dvdhsu
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.

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JoeDaDude
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...](https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=objects&type=keyword&x=0&y=0&kv=75606&record=18&page=1)

[2] [https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-
shannon...](https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man-
games-and-machines)

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robinhouston
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.

~~~
tzs
You can apparently borrow this book online for 14 days:
[https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass](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...](https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-
Bass-ebook/dp/B06XGM7K64/) 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).

~~~
robinhouston
Thanks! It’s remarkably reassuring to hear from someone else who remembers it.
And thanks for the extra detail.

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celestialcheese
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"

~~~
caf
Ed Thorp also wrote the seminal work on card counting, "Beat the Dealer"
(1962).

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dangoldin
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...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-
Information/dp/1476766681)

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anfractuosity
This video is interesting I thought, on the topic of beating roulette, about
the Eudaemons.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYIGGBXlTL8)
'Beat the Wheel'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons)

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danbmil99
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"

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somberi
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...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733505-a-man-for-all-markets)

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sosa2k
I've always thought Shannon has been a bit underappreciated as a scientist

