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Beating Roulette With Computers & Lasers
MeerCat writes "The BBC are reporting that a group of gamblers who won more than £1m at the Ritz Casino by using laser technology have been told by police they can keep their winnings.
A laser scanner linked to a computer was allegedly used to gauge numbers likely to come up on the roulette wheel.
Of course this could be Labour spin to try and get people excited about the idea of cheating at mega casinos"
If it is possible to win by detecting non-randomness then the wheel, or the process for using it, is bent.
My main objection to casinos is not that they provide a place for gambling - people will do this, and it is probably better that they do this in a way subject to some sort of regulation - but that reported incidents suggest they do not run fair games, and that the stacking of the odds on e.g. fruit machines is probably intended to fuel gambling addiction. It's like the alcohol industry producing alcoholic fruit drinks to get kids hooked, or just about any strategy of the tobacco industry. If the casino gets caught by someone using statistical analysis, the law should not protect them from their own dishonesty.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The roulette shoe computer is here.. UCSC, MIT ... that's near enough for government work.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm banned from Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort for card counting. Just basic deck-weighting, nothing fancy. Usually if they think you're card counting, they offer you free drinks. They always watch gamblers who aren't drinking (espeically if the drinks are comp) extra closely, and they will at the very least take away your notes or calculator, if not ask you to leave.
One should also note that Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort is notorious for not paying out much as they should for their slot machines. I wouldn't be suprised if they ask anyone trying to get a leg up to leave.
Even though they are fined by the feds for not paying out they just eat the fines and come out on top anyways.
I spent a part of my collegiate career at that casino since it was right down the road
--J
THis is what happens whe you dont pay mathematicians or engineers enough. THey go and do something insane, and everyone else doesnt know what to make of it, heheheh. Seriously though, developing that kind of program - to calculate the precise number of rotations on a spinning wheel - is the perfect example of high level engineering. I've done many questions like that only instead of Gambling wheels, it was vehicle wheels. Once you know the accelleration and the velocity at time 0, you just use standard energy equations. If you want to get fancy with your program you could figure out the oil used and the shaft used, and add in the known values for friction, etc (all this is available in charts/tables). THen all you need is the time for one full rotation, the size of the wheel and its weight (initial conditions) which you could find after two test runs with the laser velocity/accelleration finder. After that, you could make, say, a device that all you do is click a button when it starts spinning, click again after half a rotation or a full rotation, then it displays the winning number on a screen. Then, if you have an electrical engineer around, you could make into its own embedded device with a screen, about the size of a watch. Voila - El Cheaterwatch. The best thing since the Black Box. Who needs the ability to make free phone calls when you can win millions of dollars gambling, booyah.
It has to find and register the wheel, which is an object of known form. Lane Hawk could do this. It then has to find and track the ball, which is not too hard (try the Lucas-Kanade feature tracker in OpenCV) and extract position and velocity. Given that information, prediction is possible.
Now that 3D game capability is going into camera phones, there's enough processing power in phones to consider this. It can all be done with passive sensors. You don't need lasers.
Umm...You may think that math precludes gambling, but I believe that you'll find many of the more 'serious' gamblers are people well-versed in math, who beleive that their deep ability to quickly calculate their momentary odds provides them an advantage. One of my friends has a masters in mathematics from a highly prestigious university, and is the most dedicated gambler I personally know.
If you don't have an intuitive knowledge of odds calculations, you will likely do poorly at poker, because 'knowing' what your opponents could have, and luring them into betting when *you* know they have a much lower chance of winning than you is the best path to winning.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!