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Server Based Slots of the Future
prostoalex writes "The slot machines of the future won't be dumb one-armed bandits anymore, CNet reports. New generation of slot machines, to be deployed in major Vegas casinos, will feature server-based gaming with games, new features and, most important, the odds being downloaded from a central server location, not determined by internal machine algorithm any more."
Some cynics here may doubt the security of the system, but I'm sure none of the gaming vendors will hide any Easter eggs in their proprietary code. After all, if one can make software work reliably for something as complicated as counting votes, surely a simple application like a few hundred different kinds of casino games should be child's play to secure.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Boy, when's the last time TFA's reporter has been to Las Vegas? My girlfriend and I had real trouble to find a machine that even took quarters, let alone being mechanical.
Ah, there we go! Just quickly change the odds behind the backs of the players so you can reek in more... and market it as "personalized" playing experience. There is no step two...
I won't comment on the moronic reference to DoD encryption "to make it safe"...
You meant to spell "dumpy" right? Yeah, those machines are too big.
Hasn't it? Harrahs black jack tables are computerized. You can see a CAT-6 cable running out of a computer under the table... They are obviously all going to one server. I'm sure it's the same with the slots there, too.
Imagine what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of these!
I'll pass.
Cheers
Smile.
At 0730 today, myself and fellow soldier of fortune Luke Genitals infiltrated the Geek Compound. Our mission - the "Official Slashdot Guide to Moderation." We finally procured a copy of this document from a pile of S&M oriented pornography and left to meet up with our buyer. Things went bad at the drop, we got set up, and now I am being trailed by both the Yakuza and Cmdr. Taco. If I should not make it through the night, I want you to know the truth so my life was not lost in vain.
My friends, I have seen unspeakable things at the Geek Compound. I can never forget the horrors I witnessed...horrors that no amount of money can undo. If I live I might share some, but I must first escape my present situation. Here is an electronic copy of the stolen document. I have burned the original and ingested the ashes so please spread this around. I regret nothing and we cannot allow the truth to be censored.
Official Slashdot Guide to Moderation
rev. 3 5/29/00
by Cmdr. Taco
Introduction - Welcome sir to the fine world of being a Slashdot moderator! In this document we shall attempt to explain the ins-and-outs of moderation via the 4 key issues of what we taught you while at the Geek Compound.
1 - Physical Changes - When we took you under our wing, you were but a boy. Now you are a fine specimen of manly wonder! To mark this right of passage we have, as you already can tell, altered your physical body. Do not be alarmed at this, rather embrace these changed to allow you to serve Slashdot better.
The humor bypass is by far the most important part of moderation. Humor, sarcasm, and wit are not good things to possess and only hinder your job as a moderator. By use of our high radiation emitting CRTs we have atrophied the humor portion of your brain. This enables you to see through the juvenile behavior exhibited in many posts to the -1, Offtopic nature they actually are.
Remember - Humor is evil! We have freed you from the bondage of laughter forever.
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And lets be honest here...you didn't really have a girlfriend regardless of what you told your friends. Embrace your asexual nature and let us frolic in the meadows as eunuchs, together!
Take a good look at your chest now. Does the "property of
By displaying this brand to a clerk, you are eligible for 10% discounts at the following stores: K-Mart, Phil's Discount Liquor and Methamphetamine, and Slutty Sally's Steakhouse. Clothes, entertainment, and food - all bases seem to be covered
2 - Crack - Smoking crack is an integral part of moderation. We will provide you with an unlimited supply of crack rocks, pipes, and lighters. We find that smoking crack enables you to mark posts in the more PC and friendlier image Slashdot needs to present. While you may be opposed to drug use, you must smoke crack to moderate.
As you might have seen on your visit to the Geek Compound, we have a large room devoted to crack manufacturing. Our well-trained Malaysian slaves convert raw cocaine into crack just for you! Do not worry about the addictive properties of cocaine as will provide you with more LSD and Xanex if crack addiction troubles you.
Please note - This is not freebase! Freebase is dangerous to produce if ethyl ether is used. This is rock cocaine, aka
Could you plug your own cable in and pretend to be the server? Not that I want to face casino security, but it's an interesting scenario.
I am trolling
Hi, What about automatic day-trading in FX derivatives or equities with the collected monies of (say) each 100 players? In the short term this really would be pretty random, with the broker acting as "house" and guaranteed an income... Rgds Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
I occasionaly think about Quake 3 played for money.
The missing ingredient here is the cheat proofing.
If Vegas Inc develops the cheat-proof Quake 3 derivitive, then Vegas Inc conquers the world.
Lot more fun to watch GTV than poker.
But I never really cared for the video slots.
There's something about a real reel reeling that sends me reeling...
Brett
--"You keep using that word...I do not think it means what you think it means."
I'm guessing there won't be an external port on any of the machines with a label "insert server spoof machine interface cable here" so you would probably have to take apart the machine to access some kind of internal port, assuming it has any ports at all.
Unfortunately casino security would probably find attempting to dismantle the machine a rather suspect activity.
So now, instead of trying to take a peek at/modify the machine guts, they try to peek at the communication, or just get a bunch of zombie computers to pwned! the servers. And aren't most of the scams with gambling machines inside jobs? Please, tell me how consolidating the working of a large group of slots into ONE MACHINE is going to increase the security? Just tell a bunch of your friends that row X of slots are going to be winning for 5 minutes starting at a certain time. Keep payouts small, but positive, and it probably won't be caught.
I personally can't wait to see pictures of whole casino floors displaying banks and banks of BSODs!
Server based slut machines.. My fault
What would be cool is if you had a first person shooter. The top 5 people with the most kills would win the pot?
I could have sworn I watched a show about this 2 years ago. Saying all the machines in this chain were controlled centrally from a warroom looking place, as well as the odds.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
I bet some geek figures out a certain pattern in which you can play that causes a buffer overflow (or something) thus resulting in the payout. :P
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
This will be fun to sniff. Hope they use wireless!
..., I only smoke and drink when I'm playing casino games... ...now wireless, at a bathroom near you.
http://www.michel.eti.br
Last time I checked this was a fairly busy and popular site. Shouldn't there not be typos? Perhaps I am asking too much. And while I'm on the subject would it really be that hard to get a spell check built into /. ?
Read, the, summary, again, and, weep
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Because the "odds" may be set and/or changed at the whim of the casino and are no longer fixed (wildly on the side of the casino, sure, but fixed none-the-less), it is no longer a game of chance, but a game of asking the casino "pretty please, may I win today?"
Because it is no longer a game of chance, it is no longer gambling. Therefore it is not covered under the gaming laws of the State of Nevada and is illegal.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I say the word "corruption"?
We all know WEP is pretty much worthless and WPA has proven to be crackable. What encryption are they planning to use that'll be secure?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Now that they can alter the odds quickly, they'll keep shifting the winning machine away from that Lucky Granny Blue Hair that always seems to win!
Let's see you win NOW Gramma!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
- Idiots,
- Cheaters, or
- MIT students.
Or perhaps I'm being redundant.I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Stoopid
I don't see how this is anything new.
Odyssey makes machines that do this already (boot from a central server, and play the games the server hands to it) and the majority of slot machines that exist on the casino floor already have ethernet and share the odds distribution between them.
This keeps odds at 1:600, or whatever they need to be instead of NSlotmachines:600.
I have implemented one of these systems. Many of the newer slot machines have been getting results from a central database for at least a decade. The results typically are generated from a few days to a few weeks in advance, which lets the casino confirm the payout percentages before making the gameset go live.
The way to look at it though is that the Casino does not care if you win big. In fact, the casino likes big jackpots, the bigger the better, because they more than make up for in the the extra attention they get. More attention = More players = More dollars played
They win a certain percent of every dollar played. The more dollars that get played the more they win.
...are to be found in the basement of the Excalibur Hotel and Casino.
You have arcade games, Skeeball, and IIRC, bowling. One of the biggest arcades I've been to. If you're dragged to Vegas here's a chance to have some fun and escape the smoke and shouldn't-be-wearing-bikinis waitresses.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh well, maybe in 10 more years then.
Sounds great... BUT since they're all sure to be paying out vouchers (as most machines there are now, a reason I don't play slots anymore) there's no actual cash in the local machine...
So let's say you are successful at plugging in and forcefeeding yourself a win - you surely wouldn't be getting a correctly coded voucher, so you'd never be able to actually collect!
Ah, there we go! Just quickly change the odds behind the backs of the players so you can reek in more... and market it as "personalized" playing experience. There is no step two...
You can't do that, it is illegal, at least in Nevada.
If you would rad up on the subject a bit more, you would see the point of this change is that the casino can compute far in advance the results for every pull of the slot, so that they can know the payout percentages in advance. This way, they can schedule the big jackpots, for instance.
Main point is, they cannot change the odds of machines on the fly - the odds need to be posted.
I wonder if they'd get suspicious if I brought in my laptop while playing?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I hope they use Windoze(tm). Imagine all those blue-screened slots.
The value of "comps" is almost precisely equal to your rate of gambling / the house edge.
So, if the Casino's edge is 5% and you want that $300 room, you'll have to guarantee them that your time gambling will net them $300. So, if you sit around gambling for eight hours, you can probably get that comp if you throw $750 per hour across the table. However, if you spend most of the day between the pool and the buffet and maybe spend two hours at the tables, you'll have to be pushing $3k per hour at the dealer. Now, if you want the $1,500/night suite and dinner for two at the $100/plate restaurant and you're planning on gambling for four hours, you'll have to drop $10k per hour.
The "benefit" here is that if your stats are up, you don't need a reservation -- there are always comp rooms because it makes more sense to comp a $300 room to someone who is tossing $6,000+ at the tables than to sell it to someone playing $500 on the nickel slots. and if you know what you're doing, your gambling losses won't far exceed your comps, but make no mistake, you're paying for them.
This is one way the computers are your friend. At the tables, unless you're very conspicuous, you have to make an effort to make sure you're being rated. If you're playing the machines, every dime you bet goes into the comp calculation.
I sorta hacked a dime machine once, earned five bucks just by fidgeting with the weel just so. I don't trust video slots. The hard slots were/are cool because after a certain point their is no physicle way for them to not pay out, as they have to many dollers. The vid stuff is crap. Skip las vegas. If I want to gamble I'll ask the hot iranian waitress to kiss me. Otherwise close is for sex,dancing and handgrenades.
1. Profit 2. Go to step 1
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
If the machines are insecure, it hurts the casinos because of tampering. If you're not committing the tampering, you will lose your money either way.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It does it use unsecured wi-fi... :-D
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
I stopped watching after the first ten minutes of episode 4. The previous 3 episodes had all ended with the characters in extreme peril. 2,3,4 all began with the characters safely back at home or home base. They either ignored the previous cliffhangers or made comments to the extent of, "Boy I'm sure glad I got of that okay"
.. But you should be able to intercept any bits being actively read out with complicated enough signal processing...
And that's when I realized: It was a spy show about a woman, for women. Or at least, for people who don't care about the details of the action packed fight, rather the intricate maneuverings of the skilled combatants leading up to the big event.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Has anyone ever actually won keno?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I see you payed attention during my first day lecture.
You see people at the bar getting beers at 7am. So you are in a bar at 7am.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think that the casinos are making a big mistake because people go to the casinos to gamble on INDIVIDUAL machines that play one game..(ask yourself, why people all don't drive the same styled cars?).if you look at each machine, they are made to play that game and people like to try to figure out the odds of each type of machine (the odds vary for even the same type of machines by time of day, use etc), the machine manufacturers go to great expense to make a game machine a work of art and something pleasing to use, generic machines are something from a totalitarian state wet dream.
If you replace these machines with a crop of generic mcgambling slot machines, then you take away a big part of casino gambling, if you can't identify each machine (you have 10000 identical "terminals" sitting there, then you might as well play one machine and leave because you have lost a big part of the casino experience.
Why go to a casino if its just a terminal you are playing, the current crop of machines have a personality to them on their payouts, otherwise, go gamble on a lottery ticket or your home computer/cell phone. If people get used to the idea of a generic terminal, then they will see no advantage in trying to figure out the odds.
I bet that this is orchastrated by one big machine manufacturer who wants to replace all the different machines by one "generic terminal" experience...it may make money for the machine manufacturer and the casino can save some small amout of money buying one type of machine, but if people don't find the experience exciting and it boecomes some generic "big brother" downloaded game experience, then the casinos should just close now and soave their money buying the "new, less exciting, generic game machines".
I think that this will actually be more insecure. With a regular "dumb" machine, it's pretty hard to hack it, let alone alter it in any way or report its statistics to some other computer, because casino security is watching the floor. With a main server, even if the code is reviewed, there's got to be some holes. And once there's holes, there's hackers. Imagine a hacker connecting to the free broadband in the hotel room of the casino, hacking into the server, and changing the algorithim slightly and the code to make it so that one machine (and one machine only) spits out full jackpot at a certain amount of time. The hacker walks out of the room, plays the machine, and *bam* he's won.
Plus, the reviewing brings up another interesting scenario - code reviewed by the Nevada gov't will be catalouged somewhere - what if a hacker got into the gov't system and stole the code that way?
Vegas makes its money on people who are too stupid or lazy to learn how the games work (or too rich to care). You wouldn't see many people lining up to play these games because they require skill, reflexes and very little luck. The person playing a slot machine obsessively waiting for that lucky payout is not going to exhibit the same behavior when they get whipped by veteran players as soon as they walk up to the machine.
Its the same with MMORPGs: they pull in more people that play for longer than networked FPSs because you don't have to be skilled to play.
Maybe this will make some slots more fair. I used to work as an engineer in the uk fixing fruit machines (as slots are known over here) and the scams involved are pretty nasty. We were always asked to set the lowest % win rate possible on all machines, regardless of what was printed on the legal notice on the front of the machine.
We also used to put the machines in a mode that payed out big consistenly, spin the reels for 5 minutes or so, and then put the cash back in the chutes. This meant the machine thought it had paid out a ton in the recent past, further reducing the odds.
I lasted 1 year in that job - boy, the kickbacks were good (I got paid 1g of cocaine for fixing some machines in an illegal gambling den one time), but the karma was seriously negative.
I love a good game of Dance-Dance-Slot-Machine!
I know it's been said earlier here, but networking of slot machines is nothing new. I've been sorking in a pun in australia for a few years, and everything has been networked the entire time, they just have us manually check things seemingly for no reason at all. To turn a machine into an entirely new machine, the technician takes about 5 seconds changing the program, and changes the face plates.
Then the customers come in and go "oh wow!, a new machine!"
and they ask their friends "have you checked out the new machine mate?"
and their friend goes "no, i haven't. let's go and see whether it pays out"
my conclusion in that regard is that people are retarded
On the changing of the odds "on the fly", that will just piss people off. there is also no need for it, as the laws of probability average out your profit, we never lose even if someone wins $4000 or so at one time
No, those are the only people who gamble and expect to win. When I gamble (which is rarely), I do so in the company of friends and with a set amount of money that I completely expect to never see again. In that respect, it's no different than going to see a movie or a concert or even going out to a bar. It's a social activity which costs money. It just happens that sometimes it may cost less money than you planned.
This would be a good place to test that ARP poisoning tool I just installed.
This has been done for more than ten years in australia. All of the poker machines have local network as well as country-wide links (stats and prize pool). Odds are set at 90% - 96% to win - however this is simply a chance of winning - NOT a chance of winning more than you bet.
You may spend $5.00 on a bet, but win back $0.50c - this is considered to be a "win".
So now, all you need is one hacker and he can bring total chaos to the casino. I'm not old enough to go into casinos, but don't the number of slot machines go into the thousands? I can see it now... thousands of machines, all with blinky red lights and things that make noise when you win (or so the movies have led me to believe), all awarding jackpots at once. Also, aren't payout odds specified by law? So the casino switches to legal odds when the inspectors come, then when they're gone... with a couple key taps you now have machines that don't pay out anywhere near the legal odds.
This is not news.. Back in 1992 I wrote a multiplayer bingo system in Las Vegas that kept all the logic in the server, and allows the "dealer" to manage key characteristics of the game prior to start. This kind of stuff has been happening there for the last decade.
as long as vegas is switching to computerized slots, it'd be nice if some casinos got into gaming tournaments or maybe even slot machines where you could increase your chances of winning by getting high scores or getting killing sprees in halo.
This is really old news. The U.S Army in Korea has had this in their game rooms for quite some time (since 2002, I believe). All of the machines have a smart card reader. You rent the card for a $1 deposit and then put your money into the machine. They're all networked and there is a central kiosk that's basically an ATM that you insert the card into to collect your winnings and the $1 deposit return (it keeps the card). Unfortunately, the payout ratio is something like 60%, which pales in comparison to the ~90% payout ratio of Atlantic City/Vegas. Your (if you're an American) federal tax dollars at work, swindling the soldiers and civilians living and working here...
I have lived in Nevada for many years, and I see slot machines almost every day. The only mechanical slot machines left are maybe in Virginia City. Almost ALL gaming machines have been partially or fully electronic for at least as long as ATM's have been around. They've all been "networked" for at least a decade and a half. We're talking full blown LAN's and WAN's (how do you think Megabucks works?). Of course, no matter how lucky I've ever been, I always have better odds at the ATM. I agree with the chap from down under, most people who gamble seem to be complete morons.
Bally has a line of Class 2 games.. They look like slots. But they're remotely determined pari-mutual systems.
They even run Linux on the latest models.
I've seen that the usual slashdot crowd is a little lax on history. Here are a few tidbits that I know:
1. Gaming accounting systems started around 1978. It was a Bally that started it, I believe. Running on a PDP11 in the back room. Keeping meter, drop and win percentage histories as required by gaming control.
2. Slot machines have been hooked up since that time using plain serial lines. Most use a form of encryption for the amounts and ticket validation ids.
3. This server based gaming thing isn't new but its just now starting to get approvals from GLI and NGCB ( gaming commisions in the US. ) The hard part has always been getting a hard drive into the dumb terminal. My guess is they finally found a way around that. That way they could just download the paytables ( not the personality which is the hold percentage which is heavily regulated BTW ) and not all the graphics and game code.
I do know that the NGCB looks at trend analysis of payoff data to confirm hold % over a period of time.
I thought this was going to be something interesting, like bringing online gambling to slot machines.
What a swizz.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
I live in Vegas and have done work for a certain casino and I can tell you that they've been on a computerized system like this for quite a while. I've been there at least a year and theyve had it the whole time. The system they have is made by ITG and slot machines send all their data to a cluster of MS windows servers. From there they can extract statistics, view statistical anomolies for investigation, change payouts (if they wanted), etc.
BTW, the system some people refer to on blackjack tables is something separate completely. It is called Mindplay and basically uses a piece of software in the security office to detect 'card counting' patterns by knowing what cards have been played, what card are left, betting histories, etc. and alerts them by showing regular players as green seats at a table, suspicious players as orange seats and cheaters as red seats. These also have a small display about 2" sq in front of the dealer on the table to show them what the software sees.
Surely the machine has to be able to produce valid vouchers. If the machine thinks the server just told it to pay out at 120%, it won't question, it won't print "fake" vouchers - you'll just look to have been lucky.
I am trolling
> "Vegas casinos, will feature server-based
> gaming with games, new features and, most
> important, the odds being downloaded from a
> central server location, not determined by
> internal machine algorithm any more."
The article continues: "An additional optional feature automatically feeds the coins back to a central location, one possibly as small as a pocket."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I see you are the one who stole my lecture.
Perhaps, but that's assuming that vouchers aren't being kept track of on a central box - which is highly unlikely.
So, again, even if the machine shoots our a voucher, your win would likely not be redeemable since as soon as you went to another machine or the cashier, a flag would go up saying it's a voucher the central system doesn't know about.
In 1999 & 2000 I worked for Multimedia Games, which makes slots (and video bingo, poker, keno, etc.) mostly for Indian casinos. I helped develop their client/server based system that basically did the same things described in this article. The news is more that this kind of thing is being deployed in places like Vegas and Atlantic City now, not just in the smaller markets.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
Correct. If you gamble very low stakes, you can make $20 last awhile (at the extreme, betting a single penny per spin easily makes that cash last over an hour). That's cheap compared to many forms of entertainment these days. The video slots are nice mindless fun, basically video gaming for the older crowd.
And don't forget free alcohol and slot club benefits. You may even win occasionally.
The original critical poster is under 21, for sure. Don't knock it until you try it. (Same goes for sex, for all you Slashdotters.)
I had never liked the idea of slot machines much, I preferred the skill of poker and black jack, but, they had just installed a whole bank of new slot machines in the arcade down the road and there was a distinct lack of any other games going on.
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