Slashdot Mirror
A High-tech Wheel of Fortune
tcp writes "The BBC is reporting that the London police have detained three people, for allegedly beating the roulette wheel at a London casino. Using a cell phone, a computer and a laser scanner, they were able to predict where the roulette ball would land, winning more than 1.5 million dollars in the process. This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once. The suspects have not been charged yet. The UK has been behind in bringing their gambling laws to deal with new hi-tech threats unlike the US and Las Vegas."
After winning $1.5*10^3 you'd think they'd start to get suspicious.
unlike the US and Las Vegas ahhh yes... the country of Las Vegas
I cant see the problem here. Tough on the Casino if there is a problem with their roulette wheel
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Don't gamble.
If you can find a way to improve your chances, it's probably against the rules. The only game I'm aware of that has a better than 50% chance of winning (against the house, that is) is blackjack.
Winning big (and often) on roulette raises eyebrows right away. They could have at least tried to beat a game that wasn't quite so obvious.
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money. IIRC, the Wired article on the MIT blackjack card counters said that they had quite a "low" advantage over the casino (one that seems insignificant to a lot of people), but because of the money that was invested, they were able to win over the casino in a big way.
I've seen computerized card counters - but being able to read a roulette wheel, that's something...
:)
some people who would consider themselves professionals do the same thing by eye - make a guesstimate based on when the roulette employee releases the ball - but to do it with computers - well, that's just wrong
but if it ain't illegal, it'll be hard to prosecute - it's like counting cards...not illegal, but you'll get your butt booted from the casino pronto -
RB
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
in most casinos they call no more bets before you can tell where the ball will fall. this doesn't sound plausible.
Randomness is really sometimes just a proxy for "too complex to be understood". Afterall, in any form of mixing bin, all of the balls inside do have to obey the laws of physics. If you knew the starting positions and details about all of the activities that are going on in the bin, you could possibly solve for which ball is going to be the one selected.
That's why it's essential that some details of the mixing situation should not be disclosed to the public while betting is still going on. I think what makes most daily blower-bin based lotto games unpredictible is the fact that the exact to-the-nanosecond time at which the bin is opened is being determined by a presenter who is also responsible for talking at the same time. Therefore, they can't possibly have enough control of their hands know what exactly their influence on the outcome is going to do. Since nobody else can really predict down to the fraction of a second what the presenter is going to do, everybody's on a level playing field.
I think the ultimate solution to this roulette wheel issue will be to call a stop to betting before the ball and wheel are put into motion. Therefore, by the time the information needed to determine the result of this spin is available, it will be too late to act upon it.
If the wheel was less than perfectly random, it is the casino that was cheating, not the patrons. So why are they the ones who have been detained?
Anyone ever read the book "Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich? It's an excellent read and follows the theme of this story (people beating the casino / gambling system). I think it's a little bit more sophisticated in that the characters in the book were more involved in social engineering / hacking and weren't reliant on machines to help accomplish their goal. Might be offtopic but I thought people might like to read it. I really enjoyed it :)
- I never know what to write for these things... -
That'll put a stop to such cheating.
Actually their said one beutyful girl was from Hungary with two serb guys. They said they used a mobile-shaped laser-scanning device, but they don't know if it is prohibited.
http://index.hu/tech/tudomany/ritz040323/
in hungarian.
Later they said, that this device cannot exist, as such a device would be least a pc large and needs a calibration of some hours and at least NASA technique to make it.
So at last, they said, that there are a number of people who actually can figure out what is the winning number from the spinning of the wheel by her own eye.
The article also mentions, that after all, they don't really need to now the EXACT target of the ball, if they can close out 2 numbers, they can earn an average of 3% per round.
So anyway, it's a weird weird story with SCI-FI elements...
Two Serbian men, aged 38 and 33, and a Hungarian woman aged 32 have been released on bail until 30 March.
Well, if she hadn't been arrested for cheating at the casino, she probably would have been arrested at the tobacconist anyway...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
British gambling laws from 1845 are currently in the process of being redrafted to bring them up to date with 21st Century gaming.
I bet it's illegal to duel in the casino & you have to leave your hired help in the coat room.
You don't win big when you've got a good scam like that. It's tempting, but really, you just shouldn't do it, it's a dead give away.
Worst case I ever heard of: A guy who had worked on PNRGs for casinos (yes, way back when such things were deemed good enough) decided to cash in, so he got together with a friend and wrote a quick program to sync in the the PRNG given a reasonable number of inputs. The PRNGs were mostly (and still are sometimes!) used for the keno games. He had his friend up in the hotel room with a laptop, and phoned up the numbers from a few rounds of keno. They got what seemed to be a reasonable sync, so he put a massive amount of cash predicting the next 10 numbers in order (which has stupendous returns (naturally)). Bang, up come all 10 numbers, in order. The police arrested his accomplice in the hotel room about 10 minutes later...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
So Locutus of Borg isn't allowed to play as well?
A group of students from Santa Cruz solved the physics of roulette back in the 1970's. See the Book (amazon.com).
The book you want to read is "eudaemonic pie"
It's about some kids who did this back in the 70s.
The article interviewed one of them.
Roulette isn't random, you have to have a real ball released at a real time and place at a real velocity.
Same for the wheel.
seeing as casinos are just designed to rob money from the patrons
And guess what, he was the guy who throws the ball. He says that he could throw the ball with such a precision that it would fall within a very small range of numbers from the target and most of the time it would fall onto whatever number he wanted. There are at least a few folks like this in any casino. Floor manager brings them in when someone starts winning REAL big to "reduce the odds".
:-)
He said the only way to win on roulette more or less reliably is to play against the guy who has more money than you. If the guy selects some numbers or colors, put your money onto opposite colors and numbers that are far from his numbers if possible. The guy will throw a ball in such a way as to screw the guy who put the most money into the game.
If you knew the starting positions and details about all of the activities that are going on in the bin, you could possibly solve for which ball is going to be the one selected.
;-) So although you may be able to predict the positions of the balls over a very short space of time, the inaccuracies would mount until your predicted results bore no resemblance to reality...
Unfortunately though, we live in an analogue World. It's impossible to specify the exact position of anything in relation to anything else
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The UK has been behind in bringing their gambling laws to deal with new hi-tech threats unlike the US and Las Vegas.
Heh...the good ol' U.S. Where murderers, drug dealers and rapists get away every day - but if you steal from Vegas, you're going down.
Thomas A. Bass wrote a pretty good book on this. I think it's out of print at the moment, but Amazon seems to list it as shipping, so who knows. It's called "The Eudaemonic Pie." It's a far better book than the recent Mezrich book on blackjack. The teams Mezrich describes were basically working some old and well-known techniques that they didn't themselves invent (despite Mezrich's heroic efforts to make them seem like geniuses). The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things. The Bass book has good hack content, the Mezrich book has little if any.
As an aside... If you really want to play an advantage game in a casino, try a game where you don't play against the house. Like poker.
Does anyone have ANY sympathy for the gambling industry? Living within 100 miles of 8 or so indian casinos in southern california, I have seen first hand that gambling is as destructive as drugs, alcoholism and tobacco.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Leave the technology at home and tip well. You'll win a little, but not a suspicious amount.
Beating the odds on a roulette wheel has been done before and was done most famously by "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo" Joseph Jaggers. He made $450,000 which in 1873 was a LOT of money.
AFAIK in order to circumvent predicting the numbers by this method, the casinos regularly move the wheels from one table to another. The act of moving the wheel throws the predictors off aswell as changing any possible bias in the wheel.
This newer technique seems better, although it seems that you have to know the coefficient of friction between ball and wheel which I suppose could vary enough between each wheel to throw of your calculations.
The Machine stops.
It was illegal because they exploited the system.
It's kind of like hacking (to relate it back to Slashdot terms). Yeah...the computer(wheel) has flaws, but that doesn't make it okay to use them to your advantage.
They're allowed to remove money from your pocket -- the moment you start removing money from theirs, you're banned/jailed, etc.
Ain't it grand?
at roulette, by Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Further details can be found on New Scientist
DrkBr
Remember, once you have a large enough amount of capital, any advantage over 50% is garaunteed to make you money.
This is true, but you need to have amounts of money approaching or exceeding the capitalization of the casino (the ratio of the sizes is important). IIRC, big casinos are usually capitalized at over $10 billion to avoid the problem of losing streaks. With a only a slight advantage and a modest starting stake, too many random walks of bets end in gambler's ruin. And if you pick a tiny casino, then the most you can win is modest. (And if you pick any casino, they will throw you out if you win too much.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But you can't get all the information (uncertainty principle), and in any chaotic system, even small errors in the initial state will blow up exponentially.
Ball Control
Although no casino will admit to its existence and very few dealers will nod in acknowledgement, this method is very powerful and easy to disguise. One cannot deny that a roulette event is heavily influenced by a human dealer. After all, it is the dealer who kicks up the rotor speed and launches the little white ball isn't it? These actions definitely affect where the ball will land. And after years of repeatedly spinning, the dealer develops what athletes call "muscle memory" or a consistent delivery system. I will admit it to you right here, as someone who has dealt the game of roulette, SOME DEALERS CAN CONSCIOUSLY INFLUENCE THE RESULT OF THE GAME. There, I said it! I know that deflectors may knock a ball off its original course or the ball may spatter when it crosses onto the rotor and hits a pocket fret, but even if a skilled dealer could navigate around the heavily bet sectors on the wheel only 10% of the time, the casino's edge would be 100% for those spins! The house's edge would then be [(9) x 5.26% + (1) x 100.00%] all divided by 10. This averages out to a whooping 14.73 % edge! To further add to this dilemma, there is no way to prove that the dealer is trying to cheat you, unless you can read minds! My general observations have led me to believe that "male" roulette dealers are more territorial. If you begin to win steadily at their tables, they feel challenged and may spin against you... that is unless you're a shapely female wearing a low-cut dress. I've also seen first-generation immigrants working as dealers, who are staunchly loyal to their new employers. If the issue of ball control troubles you, you can simply wait for the dealer to spin before placing your bets. You might actually turn this technique in your favor. If you recognize a skillful dealer and can build a rapport with him or her, you may be able to exploit their ability. One way to induce a dealer into hitting your number is to bet a sector or continuous section on the rotor of say, five pockets. Place a toke out for the dealer on the number situated at the sector's center. The dealers seem to appreciate a crack at collecting 35 times their original toke if they exhibit some control. If they miss your center number by one or two pockets, then you still win on the neighbors contained in that sector.
Source
We mathematicians made sure that the games in the casino would steal the customers blind, well with a quite high probability anyway.
You can't win against maths (Any Teenager in any school knows that... ^_^).
So, feel free to play if you want to get poorer...
And feel free to cheat if you want to end up dead/in jail...
The bit that defeats me is the nerve to attempt the sting - and for large stakes. Face it, when large sums of money are in play, people get protective about it. I'd expect that's why this was tried in the UK, despite lower potential returns than the big US casino scene; in the UK outfitting unwanted punters with concrete boots is comparatively rare...
Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if gang money was behind developing this little con.
It's a classic suckers bet. You'll run out of money or hit the table limit eventually. This is where probability theory comes in handy.
What "system"? Since when is a casino's right to win people's money protected by law? They didn't exploit the system, they accurately predicted the behavior of a physical object (roulette wheel). If this allows them to win the game, then great. If the casino doesn't like this, then they're free to remove the roulette game from their casino, or simply refuse service to these people (most businesses are allowed to refuse service to people as long as they're not discriminating based on race, gender, etc.).
Your comment is only valid in a linear process. You always have some measuring error, if only the size of an atom. in a linear process this is no big problem as small measuring errors only give a small deviation in the result. In non-linear processes a small variation can have a large difference in the result. This behaviour described by chaos theory mathematics.
The most famous example is the weather, were a butterfly flapping it's wings in the Amazone could theoretically cause a violent storm in Brittain. This mathematician in the first Jurassic parc film also tries to explain it, using drops flowing down from a hand.
I think balls in a bin are a chaotic process.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The greatest hack I ever pulled off involved an online casino. The casino used a Java applet for the gaming - everything from Blackjack to slot machines. Bored on a weeknight, I downloaded the Java applet (JAR file) to my computer and used a java decompiler to restore the original source code. Unfortunately, the code was obfuscated, but what I found next surprises me to this day. The java applet was using the client machine to generate the random numbers used in many of the games, namely the slot machine. I modified the code slightly to increase the chances of winning on the slot machine and then recompiled the code. There was a small problem, however. The code was written so that a response from the client to the server was sent indicating how much was bet, the payout and the winning combination (or hand). Thus, it was possible for them to statistically analyze my gamblings and calculate that I was winning more than I should have been. So instead of winning of the slot machine, I would win at Blackjack by modifying the code to display on screen what the dealer's cards were, and what the next card in the deck was. Thus, it was possible for me to decide on when to hit and when to stand. I will not tell you how much I won but I will tell you that I have never been caught.
Using the same logic Casino exploits system of propablity to get money from customers. Thus Casio leaders should be jailed?
I don't think it's right for casinos to do this.
You might as well outlaw all ways that people try to give themselves better odds. Those who go to certain slot machines (that have been loosing for a long time) should be illegial, since it is a way people try to improve their odds.
People playing blackjack should be thrown out if they stay at a pre-set number (eg. 17 or 18).
My point is that it should not be illegial to beat the house... But that seems to be the way it is. There is no consistency in the rules of what is and is not acceptible at a casion, EXCEPT that you are doing something wrong if you win.
Counting cards with a computer could be reasonably considered illegial, but how about those that do so without computer assistance?
People should be able to sue a casio that throws them out (when they are winning) without any proof that they are cheating.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
First of all, I don't know what kind of advantage you are talking about. Even in the most favorable of games, using the most complex card-counting system, your advantage at blackjack isn't going to be more than a few percentage points. As a team working covertly you might get a 50% advantage, but on your own there's no way.
Second, to get that advantage, you have to make no mistakes. NONE. You have to play for weeks to overcome the standard deviation (assuming you even have enough money to stay in play). And if you don't play perfectly, you will either not make money, or worse, you will lose it.
Casinos love the "blackjack myth" because it draws more suckers to the tables.
If you want to beat someone at gambling, why would you pick an opponent who has more than a lifetime of experience? The casinos have been making money for a very long time.
As a non-gambler, I know nothing about how roulette is played. From the article it seems to imply that you can wait for the ball to be released, observe the course of ball and wheel, do the math to predict the outcome, and then place your bet. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood? Common sense would seem to require that all bets be placed prior to the ball and wheel being put in (randomized) motion to prevent just that sort of thing.
Does a horse track still take bets as the steeds enter the final stretch?
So what we have here are laws that are designed to protect an obsolete business model from technology. And yet: these laws have nothing to do with protecting anyone from force or fraud.
Wait a minute .. why isn't it fraud?
It's not fraud because the little gambler never asserted that he promises to remain stupid and not make use of information, or to not do anything that will help him. (What's next, are you going to make it illegal to cross your fingers and pray?) It's not like the other consenting partner in the gamble, isn't making use of a shitload of information and technology against him. And it isn't as though the other partner doesn't doesn't already have odds on their side. So the very premise that 'fairness' has somehow been compromised, is laughable.
The fact is: some forms of gambling have been made obsolete, and we're propping them up with legislation. That doesn't smell good, to me. And it sets a really lousy precedent. If gambling can be propped up, then other industries can be, too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, but given the odds paid in this game, if any player can sucessfully predict any three spots where the ball won't land, they will have done enough to create a player advantage.
Corollary: it's possible to derive an easily-memorized algorithm for consistently beating the House at Roulette... that only works for spherical cows in a vacuum.
Are you exploiting the system when you clip coupons, too? Those prices are meant to ensure the viability of the food company. Taking the 20% off is raping society, dudes. Oh wait. No.
:D)
Seriously, if the game can be exploited by a person (or his computer) then the game is no good. The casinos have no right to make money. If the want money, they should invent a better game!
(And this is NOT like computer hacking. That's like entering someone's home through their unlocked door [actually, it's like hacking into a computer. that's why it's computer hacking and not robbery.. but anyway]. This is more like coming late to class everyday because you know your professor will be later.
My other car is first.
is full of eels!!
But, theoretically, IF you knew with precision, the exact locations and other qualities of all the subatomic particles that comprise the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the material of the balls and cage, and you knew precisely the speed and direction of the air blowing up into the cage,and all the details of the atoms inthat moving air, etc, etc, etc, then you could predict what would happen.
The problem is, we can never know enough. We can know a little, and make a few crude, short-term predictions, but we never know enough to make accurate, longer term predictions.
I think the ability to know ALL the variables is what makes someone God.
you need about 100$
step (1) bet 25$ on black, if you win, step 1 else step 2
step (2) bet 50$ on black, if you win, step 1 else step 3
step (3) bet 100$ on black, if you win, step 1 else step 4
step (4) bet 200$ on black, if you win, step 1 else step 5
step (5) bet 400$ on black, if you win, step 1 else leave casino, you just managed to beat one in 32 odds (give or take)
every time you hit, you are ahead 25 dollars.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Historical quirk: I live in Kansas City, KS. Across the state line in MO there are riverboat casinos that were originally approved under the language that mentioned 'games of skill'. At that time, video draw poker was legal, because of the skill involved in deciding which cards to hold, and which to discard, but not the run-of-the-mill slots (which have since been allowed by changes in the law). At that time, this method of winning at roulette, or card counting at the blackjack table, could not have been opposed by the casinos because they had to maintain the legal theory that skill was involved in these games. The boats in MO quickly adopted rules for the number of decks in the shoe, how far into it a reshuffle is done, and the delta between minimum and maximum bets, so as to make counting irrelevant. I believe those rules remain in effect today...
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Disclaimer: My ex-wife is a blackjack dealer.
Card counting, and the computer simulations used to justify it, fail in two fatal ways:
1. They assume a random distribution of the cards at shuffle. This is so far from the truth it is unreal. Each casino has a different way to shuffle the shoe. It does redistribute the cards, but it is not at all random.
Since casino has its own shuffle any strategy will be casino-specific. The distribution of high and low cards gets slowly shifted at each shuffle. At the beginning of the day every deck is in a pre-set order. Each shuffle modifies that order in a predictable way. If you have a card counting strategy, it would be best to include, as part of your strategy, the number of times a shoe has been shuffled. When they break open new decks of cards, the shuffle count starts anew.
2. They assume that the dealer is neutral. This is, at best, naive. The dealer will break a table to run off obnoxious guests and to make room for players that tip well. The dealer will reward players that do tip well. Can't be done legally? Think again.
Any experienced dealer will tell you that a shoe has a "flow" to it. The shoe will either be rewarding the house or the players. When the dealer shuffles the cards, they can either shuffle in a way that generally preserves the flow or shuffle in a way that generally reverses the flow. This does not work 100% of the time, but it does work.
The dealer cannot target a particular player, but they can target the table as a whole.
Got a dickhead at your table? Watch out! The dealer will break him to make him go away. The house will take all of your money, too.
Is everybody at the table nice, cool, and tipping the dealer and waitresses well? Keep it up and watch your fortunes multiply.
Is the table down (losing money) for the shift? Better leave, because the pit boss gets in trouble when this happens, so he will lean on the dealers to raise some cash for the table.
Is it the end of the night and the dealers want to close the table, but you are persistent and wish to play? Get ready to lose your bankroll at a breathtaking rate.
When a new dealer comes to the table, he or she will generally ask how the game is going. They are trying to ascertain the flow of the current shoe. Sometimes when you lose a hand, they will tell you, "Just wait until the next shoe, it will be better." They are telling you that the shoe flow is favoring the house and they will attempt to reverse it at the shuffle. While waiting for the current shoe to run out, bet low (to keep from losing too much) and tip well (so the dealer doesn't change his mind).
If you don't believe this, just go to a set of blackjack tables and watch for a while.
Sheesh.
<bart
Last time i went to vegas, the dealer cut off betting before the spin, according to this article the betting is cut off after 3 rotations. So basically the method I observed stops any prediction based cheating at all
We've got a problem: Some folks want to legalize gambling everywhere because it generates tax revenue. Other folks have are morally against gambling, as it bleeds dry the compulsive gamblers, and invites organized crime. Now we're hearing about overseas, Internet-based gambling.
I have the solution: Give those who beat the system a slap on the wrist (assuming they don't actually steal from accounts, but figure out how to beat the odds), and let them keep their winnings. Eventually it won't be profitable to be in the casino business.
Problem solved.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
The computer used in Eudaemonic Pie was less capable than an Apple ][.
I'm sure this could system could be vastly improved upon now, and perhaps even succeed.
I didn't know "The Eudaemonic Pie" was released under another name.
Give the croupier a dozen or so balls of varying density and elasticity but identical appearance. Have him select one at random for each game.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
..but the new rules will limit the size of countries you can subjugate. It also limits Britain to colouring no more that 40% of the Globe pink.
You can also hack many of those games that are available on satellite/cable networks. In those games where the entire game state is displayed on the screen at the same time, it's possible to grab a frame off the screen, analyze it (convert the screen image into a logical representation), run it through an emulator and use a small amount of AI to find the optimum solution. At the very least, you avoid having to fork out money every time you want to play the game. The real benefit is when there is a prize. Then you only need to play the game twice (first time to get the levels, second time to enter the optimum solution) to get a return for your money.
Clarification for the record:
The U.S. Congress oversees regulation of interstate commerce and those aspects of commerce within states that interstate businesses' lobbyists claim interfere with interstate commerce. The states such as Nevada regulate commerce within a state, and states can delegate responsibility for specific areas to the individual counties or cities within a state. Thus, casinos in Las Vegas have to follow three layers of law: federal law, Nevada law, and Vegas law.
Oh, please, won't someone think of the casinos!?!
You might want to look up this little concept called Quantum Mechanics. It disagrees with what you just said. But them, perhaps QM is wrong.
No, you cant. You can never ever ever predict it, no matter how much you 'know'. Because, there is always randomness, quantium uncertainty...Chaos.
Meteorologists have been trying for years to predict weather patterns. They have always thought it was a problem that they just dindt know enough, that their computer just couldnt simulate it detailed enough.
It turns out its impossible to predict a complex system. There is true randomness that just cant be predicted.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
What a complete and total crock. Do you and your "wife" play lots of duke nukem forever too? Lying to support made up bullshit like that is shameful.
If you know enough, you can predict any system.
It's just that it is beyond human ability to know enough, so we call the (to us) unpredictable events 'random'.
The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things.
:-)
I'll say - besides hacking roulette and pioneering wearable computing, these guys were also instrumental in formulating modern chaos theory. In the 90s some went on into stock market/exchange rate prediction.
Their first-generation roulette computers were strapped to the chest under loose clothing. What they didn't count on was the sweat caused by the stress of actual casino operation shorting out the electronics, causing (in at least one case) severe chest (hair) burns... hence the move into a shoe platform for release 2.
An entertaining read for sure. AFAIK it has been floating around Hollywood as a movie script for many years but has yet to be taken up. I had hoped to see it produced in the wake of the 70s/80s revival... sort of a "Blow" for geeks.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
Fscking casinos.
Bah, the solution is obvious. The casinos just need to start using subatomic particles as Roulette balls, so that you would have to build a Heisenberg Compensator to cheat like this.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
So they predicted where the ball was going to land after it bounced around like fuck? I think they should be allowed to keep the money if they are that good...
There should be a rule that if you don't get catch on the night you cheated at the casino you can keep what you win!
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Uncertainty is built into the fabric of the universe. Read some physics books. For some systems, predictability is impossible.
XML causes global warming.
The casino fixes the odds so that they make a profit, why shouldn't the players do the same? I see on reason why the law should ensure that roulette can make a profit for casinos.
The trio are now on bail and have not been charged with any crime.
That's because they didn't commit any crime, because they were in England, not Las Vegas.
As the article says, He [Packard of Eudaemonic Pie fame] stopped his own attempts partly because new laws in some US states barred computers from casinos. British gambling laws from 1845 are currently in the process of being redrafted to bring them up to date with 21st Century gaming.
Meaning that British laws are being redrafted to ensure that casino customers are not allowed to do what the casinos do: control the odds and play the other party for a sucker.
This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once
Yes, that movie is actually one of my favorite classical comedies. It's called The Hoenymoon Machine starring Steve McQueen. The movie tells the story of three navy men who develop a scheme to win at the roulette tables in a Venice casino. At first, their plan goes off without a hitch until Navy Admiral Fitch gets involved and suspects an invasion. It only complicates things that McQueen is dating the Admiral's daughter. Ofcourse, it's a 60s romantical comedy, so in the end everything goes fine and no know gets hurt or jailed or anything.
The Navy officers in the movie actually use a Radar scaner, and a phone to perdict how to win in the roulette. Considering that these guys that are being busted in the UK also more or less used the same technology, I wonder if they actualy got the idea from this movie.
--
Subject says it all. Meme must die.
Are you exploiting the system when you clip coupons, too? Those prices are meant to ensure the viability of the food company. Taking the 20% off is raping society, dudes.
What an extraordinarily stupid analogy. The coupons are issued by either the food company or the specific merchants themselves and are meant to be used. Now if casinos offered a coupon for 5% better odds, your comparison (though sarcastic) would remotely apply.
The classic example of "cheating" would be professor announcing a closed-book exam (telling you that you are not supposed to use any information besides what is stored in your head) and you call your friend on a cell phone asking for an answer from a textbook. Casinos rarely operate in this way, you do not get any warning not to use everything you can to beat the odds. It is more like managing to solve a tough computational problem by hooking up a network of computers together with some hardware accelerators and optimizing the datalink between them, something which might get you promoted rather than being accused of cheating... Or do you think that medieval monks who started the whole probability theory were also cheaters because they tried to apply new techniques to predicting the outcomes of their favorite dice games? ;-) I think that the casino is at fault for not using cryptographically strong RNGs and THEY can be sued by public for violating some kind of "reasonable expectation of randomness"... ;-)
Paul B.
I think the casinos here are acting inappropriately, and it's far more inappropriate for the law to help them - throwing you out for using computer-assisted technology to predict roulette wheels is fine, but claiming that you were engaging in "theft by deception" isn't. Throwing you out for card-counting isn't ok; calling the police if you get caught marking the cards by nicking them might well be.
And "deception" in poker not only isn't criminal - it's an admired skill, part of the game, and it'd be really boring to play against you if you didn't ever try to deceive the other players. Keeping an ace up your sleeve or having an accomplice standing behind the other players is cheatin', and it's appropriate for the house to throw you out to avoid having their furniture broken in the equally-appropriate bar brawl. But deceiving the other players about your abilities or the cards in your hand is definitely expected.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He is correct.. in that blackjack is the only game in the house where previous rounds statistically affect the outcome of future rounds... in other words, counting cards.
,you can nudge the odds in your favor.. it's not as exotic or hard as it sounds.
If you track what has been played in blackjack
Even the simplest counting system will shift the odds in your favor, slightly.
The problem is that to take advantage of this, you have to raise and lower your bets accordingly.. bet high when the deck is in your favor, low when it's not.. and these betting swings are easily detectable by the house... and if they catch you counting, and winning consistently, you will politely be asked to not play blackjack anymore at the casino.
As a semi-pro player, I can attest that unless you are playing with a group of friends you certainly do have to beat the house in addition to the rest of the players.
In casino and online games both, the house will take a given percentage of the pot. In a cheap game ($1/$2 Limit for example) the average pot will be around $20 - The house will probably take $2 of that as part of their rake. This is the price you pay for using their table in their facility. Some card rooms will merely charge an hourly rate, maybe $6-8 depending. It all comes out to the same end- you are paying the house to play.
Novice players may disregard the rake, because hey, if you're winning you're winning, right? One of the more advanced things a player should worry about is whether they are able to beat both the players AND the rake at a given table. You could be playing winning poker, but shooting yourself in the foot by harming long-term outcomes. Though poker is highly luck based in short run (Even in best situations opponent might have a 20% 'draw' on you - this is what keeps bad players playing, everyone picks up a pot now and then), experienced players are concerned with maintaining the flow of chips in their direction, even if they take a bad beat now and then. Pros will play to win about 2.5 'big bets' an hour (In the $1/2 game, that amounts to $5). It becomes easy to see how a rake can eat into that expectation if you don't watch for it.
Linear congruential generators are known to be poor PRNGs, because of the "staying mainly in the plains" problem - essentially, if you use a sequence of numbers from a linear congruential generator to get a point in an n-dimensional space, and repeatedly do this to get a set of points, the points will all be in a surprisingly small number of hyperplanes in the space. This was pointed out back in the 1970's, IIRC, but people kept on using linear congruential generators with this problem for ages afterwards. For the purposes of doing physics simulations, as I understand it the current state of the art is the Mersenne Twister PRNG. It is very fast, has an insanely long periodicity (2^19,537 or some equally outrageous figure), and hasn't had any holes poked in it yet to my knowledge.
However, none of this class of PRNG is any good for casinos, or for crypgraphic purposes, because as you point out you can figure out the state of the PRNG (and thus the next numbers in the sequence) from looking at a small sample of the output. There are PRNGs that are designed to be very difficult to determine the state of the RNG from looking at the numbers. These are called "cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators", and Blum-Blum-Shub is perhaps the best known. It is like RSA in that its security is dependent on the difficulty of the factoring problem.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
After all, in any form of mixing bin, all of the balls inside do have to obey the laws of physics.
Are you sure?
Maybe the balls choose to obey the laws of physics. Or maybe they were raised ignorant, and just don't know how to defy the laws of physics.
-kgj
-kgj
Gambling problems are much more like cryptography than like simulations. The players usually aren't out to get *you*, they're just out to get your money. If they're professionals, they're willing to invest a fair amount of horsepower into getting it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm going to admit right now, I'm good at seeing the outcome of a basic physics. I think alot of computer gamers probably are. We can play missile commander with the outmost of ease and always hit our target. Applying this skill to real physics in a physical world isn't all that tough and roulette is the best casino game to apply it too.
Remember, if you can narrow the end position of that ball after one or one and a half spins down to even a third of the roulette pie, you're going to win back three times that amount of chips you scatter down. Having a friend with you is probably the best way to get your chips down in time.
I bet it's illegal to duel in the casino & you have to leave your hired help in the coat room.
Alternately, you can leave your hired help in the ratting-den, if you need to step outside for a duel.
-kgj
-kgj
More commonly, in gambling-related news, people are transported from Atlantic City to Teaneck NJ or the Meadowlands on accounta not payin' their gambling debts, and nobody saw nothin'.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was in Vegas last week and played a few rounds of roulette. One thing I noticed when I went to several different roulette tables is that on the electronic boards that showed previous winning numbers is that there would be repeats. Not of the same number, but two side by side number repeats. So out of the 16 numbers displayed, it would look something like this:
17
35
35
1
8
2
4
21
36
0
11
14
3
3
19
9
So these next-door repeats would come up more frequently than you would expect (which should be 1 out 72 times on average, ignoring the 0 and 00). It made me wonder if some physical characteristic of the roulette wheel or the dealer was causing the next-door repeats.
So perhaps one strategy of roulette is to always play the last winning number. Since it pays out 35 to 1, and as long as you have enough to keep playing, you *might* come out ahead.
... on the stupid
I do trust the guy and I know he did work as a dealer for a long time. Lemme tell you, if you bet $10M on roulette, you're going to get another dealer right away. :0) Your odds aren't small enough for them to risk $300M+.
Do a simple google search for "roulette dealer cheat" and see for yourself. IT IS NOT an urban legend. There's a reason why there are live dealers, not just a spring launcher. BTW, most people place their bets before dealer even spins the wheel. Also seasoned gamblers usually have a "system" and knowing and defeating all kinds of "systems" is one of the things that a dealer has to do.
QM does indeed throw in a level of uncertainty. No-one's quite sure what effect that uncertainty has on the large-scale world; it seems that quantum effects generally get lost when summing over the large numbers of particles we humans deal with. (Unless we do something clever to expose them -- hence lasers, silicon chips, &c.)
But chaos theory is something else. A chaotic system is still perfectly predictable if you know the starting positions and velocities with total accuracy. Instead, chaos theory looks at what happens when you don't know them; it describes how the initial tiny inaccuracies can get larger and larger until they dominate.
So systems like the weather are unpredictable mainly because we can't measure the conditions perfectly, regardless of whether the universe is predictable or not.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Casino games are about handing your money over to the Casino. They are taxes for people who are bad at math.
Anything that would interfere with the Casino's ability to suck all your money away is illegal. The Casinos employ VERY large men with guns to make it so.
The occasional rube who wins is 100% acceptable. They'll post the persons picture and make a big deal so the 254 out 255 people get a distorted view of their chances of winning. But anything that you do to enhance your chances at being number 255 is strictly off limits.
Seriously, I think that governments should tax casinos to the point where they can BARELY make a profit. It would be like church Bingo run by Donald Trump.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
These people may well be using the method pioneered in the late 1970s (IIRC) that's described in The Newtonian Casion by Thomas Bass.
The pioneers described by Bass failed because CPUs were too slow, and sweat shorted out the stomach-mounted solenoids which were used to relay betting information.
of the body of your message in the subject line. It's really freaking annoying. Use a subject like like "E" if you're really that unimaginative.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once.
Strangely enoguh, I happen to be watching it on my Tivo now....it was on TCM a few days ago and got recorded (you know....gotta tell your Tivo to record all Steve McQueen movies....it's important).
Anyhoo....The Honeymoon Machine (1961)
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Quantum uncertainty only becomes important at very small distances, very small energies, and very short timecales.
The parent is correct, since this is a classical system. If you read in all the ball positions with an accurate sensor of some type (X-Ray tomography, like a CAT scan, comes to mind) and then solve the simulation numerically, taking into account gravity, air movement, collision dynamics, etc, etc, (all these things are very well understood for classical systems like this) and you can predict the fall of the balls.
Quantum uncertainty only becomes important at very small distances, very small energies, and very short timecales.
You are correct about the uncertainty of the universe, but some things are *very* certain. The bouncing of balls in a bin is one of them.
The poster above is correct, since this is a classical system. If you read in all the ball positions with an accurate sensor of some type (X-Ray tomography, like a CAT scan, comes to mind) and then solve the simulation numerically, taking into account gravity, air movement, collision dynamics, etc, etc, (all these things are very well understood for classical systems like this) and you can predict the fall of the balls.
This is spot on.
Utter, utter bullshit.
First, there are metal studs on the wheel into which the ball occasionally runs. These pop the ball up a little bit and cause it to run down to the numbers more quickly. if this is such a factor, then the computer would definately not work at predicting the resting spot of the ball without the "studs" programmed in too, the article said nothing about studs programmed in. The Professor said that a good guess can be made from the velocity of the wheel the mass and speed of the ball. It is possible that a dealer could "aim" the ball where he wants it.
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Link
This incident was also covered on a documentary that occasionally gets aired on Discovery or The Learning Channel.
~Philly
Well I have an understanding of the concept of opportunity costs and of economics, (spelling too !) but I'm not quite sure what you are getting at in this context.
Then again, I have no idea why anybody would voluntarily play a game where they knew they were going to loose. Life has enough of that sort of "fun" already.
There was a case in Pennsylvania, a couple decades ago, where a group managed to predict one of those daily lotto games. Although in that case they'd weighed down most of the balls with paint, which did make the problem at little simpler. The winning number? 6-6-6.
Actually, the irony of your post is that your claim about gambling (that you always lose) belies your actual lack of understanding of the relevant concepts of economics here.
Its obviously true that over a long enough period of time, all of the games in a casino have a probability spread that benefits the casino over the player (although some games are as low as 51% to the casino). However, the very same math shows us that at different times the results of gambling will favor either the casino or the gambler (that is, at point A the gambler may be low, at B the gambler be high, whereas at C he's way down). The real trick to gambling (and I know, incidentally, two men who are professional poker players, i.e. they make all their income gambling) is to recognize when you're too deep in to recoop your losses (and thus, to bail out), but also to recognize when you're sufficiently high up so that you're statistically likely not to get any better. The good gamblers know how to quit, and in doing so they ride the same probabilities that the casino does.
"Stumble before you crawl"
True randomness can be represented, we just havne't come up with all the formulas yet.
Study elementary Chaos Theory, I think you'll be highly surprised at what we can predict.
(note to grammar nazis I'm drunk).
I live in a giant bucket.
LostCluster writes:
"Randomness is really sometimes just a proxy for "too complex to be understood". Afterall, in any form of mixing bin, all of the balls inside do have to obey the laws of physics. If you knew the starting positions and details about all of the activities that are going on in the bin, you could possibly solve for which ball is going to be the one selected."
This concept is one I used to share but it was, unfortunately, utterly shattered by Heisenberg.
My
Limekiller
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you're never going to get down to an atomic level of percision in measuring data because you cannot have a perfect measurement of both velocity and location at the same time. However, the further you move away from the atomic level of resolution, the more certainty you can gain in your system.
If you're willing to treat the lotto balls in a bin as individual particles rather than collections of atoms, you're simplifiying the problem to the point that it actually can be solved, as afterall, you don't exactly need to predict the exact atomic location of the winning ball, just which ball will land in the position it takes to be considered "drawn" in time to prevent all of the others from doing so.
One thing about studying the balls as pseudo-particles is you get the chance to turn Heisenberg on its head at the start of the drawing. Before the machine is powered-up, the balls are all at a dead stop. Sure, they're moving at an atomic level (unless the system is at absolute zero, but that'd make for a hard to work in TV studio...), but the whole ball isn't going anywhere. Therefore, it's a perfect chance to observe the location and assign it a momemtum of zero.
In gambling situations, you don't need to predict the result to the atomic level to make a winning bet. You don't even need to predict the exact game outcome, so long as you can predict enough game outcomes that won't be the winning outcome that you can place a bet on all the remaining outcomes and be assured a postive payout result. You don't need quantum-resolution results at all.
For example, if you found these values for one rotation:
2.4s
2.8s
2.4s
2.2s
2.0s
1.9s
2.6s
2.3s
1.9s
2.0s
2.2s
2.3s
2.4s
2.4s
2.6s
2.8s
Drop the two extremes (I know I said 50%, sue me):
2.0s
2.2s
2.3s
2.4s
2.4s
2.6s
Then average them to arrive at 2.65s.
Wouldn't this eliminate the need to know the mass of the ball and the friction of the track?
Couldn't you then just covertly cross reference the thrown speeds with the actual winning quadrant (1/2, 1/4, whatever) to get yourself a prediction matrix?
I'm not trying to pretend that these are viable methods, I'm just thinking of them as they come into my head and thinking that there must be something wrong with 'em.
Thanks in advance for the replies.
My
Limekiller
I didn't say anything about "always losing" I just said that I didn't understand "why anybody would voluntarily play a game where they knew they were going to loose."
If you can influence or predict the outcome, then that's an entirely different matter, but the casinos disallow that, and are famous for it.
If the casinos think that choosing to bet or to not bet is influencing rather than predicting the outcome ( and from their point of view it may be that you are influencing ) and ban it, then they are proscribing the betting behavior ( knowing when tobet big, bet small, or quit ) that you attribute to good gamblers.
Anyway, what's this have to do with opportunity costs? Is it just the the costs of a bet when you are at a hot black jack table are lower than at a table with a shoe full of the wrong cards ?
That may be true of games with a memory (blackjack) or games of skill (poker) but most casino games have neither. How would opportunity costs figure in a game where the odds were the same on every play, like roulette, the nominal topic here?
I was thinking of the opportunity cost of spending the day at the casino rather than doing just about anything else.
Who was it that said "when I got rich, I stopped taking naps because they were too expensive" ?
Same book different title.
Same book different name...
Since the technique is based on betting after the ball has been let go, but before it stops, all that's required is to stop betting completely before the roulette is set spinning and the ball released.
The book The Eudaemonic Pie is about the roulette team,
and the book The Predictors covers Prediction Company's exploits.
this has to do with the fact that you can calculate all the above and equation up to a certain incertainty. And every incertainty are then cumulative after all iteration of your equation (know as error range are "cumulative". The error themselves could cancel themselves out , but the maximum error possible "raise"). After enough iteration the incertainty is then the same "size" as the result itself....
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ain't poker a great game? Poker is the exception to the casino rule that says you lose money over time. After all, you're not playing against the house, but rather against other players. (The house takes a ~2-5% of everything in the pot, called the "rake")
Winning poker players have a strong grasp on the economic concepts you mention. They think about things like pot-odds and betting position. If you are a quality player there are plenty of suckers out there from whom you can consistently win money.
Slots, roulette, even blackjack for the most part are no better than the scratch tickets I see bums lining up for over at the local convenience store. Play those games long enough and you _will_ lose (well...blackjack can be beaten, but not without effort).
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
Cyno01: "Games like roulette and craps are close to pure chance and the only real skill involved is strategic betting."
Actually the single best way to improve your odds at Roulette(other than not playing) is simply to avoid Double Zero wheels like the plague. You see the older Single Zero, or European wheel, has a house advantage of 2.7%. But the Double Zero, or American wheel, has a house advantage of 5.26%.
Often casinos will have both Double and Single Zero wheels and you will see suckers at the Double Zero wheel blissfully unaware that they could walk 20 feet to the next table and get much better odds.
They can throw you out for no good reason at all...it's their property, after all. Yeah, property "rights", the last refuge of criminals.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Some would say the same of quantum particles...we can't predict their behavior because our measurements are far too clumsy. Perhaps a "perfect" measurement of anything is impossible...which could also be why the both fundamental nature of the universe, and the weather, seem inherently random.
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
Casinos LOVE this type of thing.
Why?
Because the PRESS claims that with a little smarts, the average guy can beat the casino! If you're really smart and really quiet about it, you can beat 'em and become rich beyond your wildest dreams!
Therefore, you get a lot of quasi-smart losers into the casinos, all who have the fantisy of "out-smarting Vegas". Those people proceed to lose all kinds of money as they "hone their smarts".
This is exactly how casinos attract people who are "too smart" to waste their time gambling.
Card counting, roulette prediction, psuedo-random numbers of elecontrics-based slot machines - they're all an ADVERTISEMENT designed to attract those who imagine that they're super-smart enough to tilt the odds. Of course, it simply isn't true.
The casinos in Vegas would love you to come to Vegas and attempt to put your super-smart skills into action... just as long as other players don't see you "attempting to cheat" - the casinos don't want you to scare any other customers away.
A 'hidden variable' explanation? Bell showed that local hidden variable theories weren't possible, and non-local theories seem unlikely as they contradict relativity, classical mechanics, and intuition.
So no, most physicists think that there's a fundamental uncertainty underlying quantum mechanics, one that's more than just imperfect knowledge.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The BBC is reporting that the London police have detained three people, for allegedly beating the roulette wheel at a London casino. Using a cell phone, a computer and a laser scanner, they were able to predict where the roulette ball would land, winning more than 1.5 million dollars in the process.
N0 - as they were in England, as is pretty clearly suggested, I think they would have been winning in pounds, not "dollars". Dullard.
Just put in lumpy wheels.
Table-ized A.I.
what happens, when you bet on a 50% chance starting with 10$ and double your bet, every time you loose. if you win, you can start with the 10$ all over again. nice effect is, that you do have a total win, if you leave the table with a win-round (all possible losses *are* covered by the win in the last round), so only problem would be to A) have enough cash ;) B) possible table limit C) extra bad luck...
but with a possibility of (1/2)^10, which is less than 0.1 percentage of loosing 10 rounds in a row this seems quite unlikely (although you got to have around 10k$...)
anyone ever tried this system in a casino?
Afterall, in any form of mixing bin, all of the balls inside do have to obey the laws of physics. If you knew the starting positions and details about all of the activities that are going on in the bin, you could possibly solve for which ball is going to be the one selected.
This is incorrect, but don't worry, Einstein made the same mistake, so you are in good company.
Quantum mechanics introduce randomness in any complex system, so that even if you know every single starting parameter, you still can't predict the outcome with 100% certainty (this is connected to the aptly-named "Heisenberg principle of uncertainty", although it's not exactly the same phenomenon at work).
I didn't understand "why anybody would voluntarily play a game where they knew they were going to loose."
It's not the playing with the knowledge "that they'll loose" that make them play, it's the knowledge "that they might win, and win big" - it's why many people get into playing the National Lotto: it's only a 1 pound stake, and there's a possible payout of a millon or 3 pounds, plus the smaller prizes which seem to give back something on the "investment"...I think it's been calculated that you've got more chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lotto, but how many people do you see deliberately going out in a thunder storm?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
Whoo hoo, my first troll modifier, how exciting. I never would've guessed that stating the truth was trolling... It was the sarcasm wasn't it?
Well I have an understanding of the concept of ...(spelling too !)
Too bad that understanding the concept of spelling didn't help you to construct an error-free post. I bet you can't even figure out what you misspelled.
Hmm...
Dam those (near) homophones.
Must come from living down the road from a "Loose Slots at Harold's Club" sign growing up.
Read aloud it sounded like "Lose Lots at Harold's club".
I should know better than mentioning spelling or usage late at night.
Well you know what they say about ICBMs.
Yes, I do.
In addition to losing your money at the Casino, you also lose the opportunity to invest it at a 4-10% return (depending on the security). Once you factor that in, the small potential for victory in a few games (blackjack and roulette) are completely lost.
Regarding Poker. You can't win vs the house over any period of time. You can only win vs fellow players. Reason???? The house takes a cut off every pot. So why bother using the Casino when you can use private poker games or poker tournaments?????
Finally, if you think that Casinos are such an "opportunity", I suggest you go become a professional gambler vs the Casinos. The odds are ALL rigged against you. Most pro gamblers lead a hand to mouth existence. It's really not a choice. The one's you quote are simply the survivors.
In other words, if a plague hits a village and there is a 20% survival rate, that doesn't mean the plague is "not so bad".
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
but how many people do you see deliberately going out in a thunder storm?
That's because they don't want to get wet. People don't take cover during dry lightning. Neither do I. I just stay away from flagpoles.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!