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."
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.
while this post was neither particularly funny, nor insightful, i'd like to predict that it gets modded as +5 one or the other if for no other reason than it is a first post.
Now let's see, how many decades before 1845 was the US Constitution drafted...
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
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.
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
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
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.
Well, no, it amounted to a crime because basically they effectively sold the casinos a product saying "Don't worry, this won't get hacked, it's solid", and then used their inside knowledge to hack it themselves. This amounted to defrauding the casinos - little better than an online retailer saying "don't worry, we'll keep your credit card information safe" and then promptly maxing out the credit cards of anyone who shops there. I imagine you would want to see law enforcement involved with any online retailer that did that. Just because the victim here happens to be a massively rich, morally questionable company doesn't mean they are not a victim, and don't deserve to be protected by the same laws as everyone else.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
To whom did they break confidentiality? Assuming they both worked at the company, and that they shared their program with no one else, they did not break confidentiality by simply USING said knowledge. And, as to fraud, where? I see no fraud here. There is no promise of stupidity when entering a casino, if you can win then you should.
Fscking casinos.
Whereas in Las Vegas it is pretty much unheard of. The casinos are owned by entertainment conglomerates, not the mafia. They call the police on cheaters or just throw them out. They understand that the bad pr from mafia-style behavior would cost them far more than the paltry few millions cheaters carry off each year. To the executives of these companies anything less than a billion dollars is not a "large sum of money".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If the casino would change this rule ever so slightly, and cut off betting before the ball is released, there would be no way anyone could predict where the ball would go. Casinos don't want to do this, however, because it slows down the action, reducing the rate at which money can be extracted from the customers, and quite possibly the interest in the game
It would also allow the casino to "cheat". They know the speed the wheel is spinning and they choose where the ball is released, so using the same technique as the "cheaters" (well solving for a different unknown - but they can precompute everything since they control the inputs) they can release the ball to minimise their gains.
I suspect the authorities that monitor things like machine odds would have issues with that.
People who say "They are taxes for people who are bad at math" have no understanding of the concept of oppotunity costs or economics. Slashdotters seem to overuse this comment...perhaps to make them feel superior?
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
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.
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"
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.