The Eudaemonic Pie
A high-tech adventure about breaking the bank in Las Vegas with toe-operated computers. “The result is a veritable piñata of a book, which, when smashed by the reader’s enthusiastic attention, showers upon him everything from the history of useless roulette systems to the latest developments in chaos theory,” said The New York Times. Richard Dawkins called it “an astonishing and fascinating tale of scientific heroism.” The Los Angeles Times said that “Bass has done the best job so far of capturing the marriage of technical imagination and the communal coziness that gave birth to Silicon Valley.”
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- I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
- Also, there is J. Doyne Farmer [1], who was part of a group that used computers in their shoes, early 1980s, to "game" roulette tables in Los Vegas. Story is told in Thomas Bass's interesting book, "The Eudaemonic Pie". [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Doyne_Farmer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
- Article starts out lame but then gets very good. Worth reading all the way through. In the 1980s some nerds figured out how to use hidden computers to beat roulette, by placing bets after the ball is already spinning and the computer can time its movement to predict (nowhere near perfectly, but well enough to have a statistical edge over the house) where it will land. There is a fantastic book about the adventure, called "The Eudaemonic Pie". The guys in the article managed to do the same thing without computers, and it drove the casino detective nuts.
If you like the article, the book is also great.
- The article mentioned the book The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas Bass. This was recommended to me back in the late 80s by my favorite professor in undergrad. It is quite good, a rare book that I go back and read every year or two.
- I've also read anecdotes of shoe computers for poker, IIRC.
Worth mentioning the book, entitled "The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas".
- > can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously)
The fantastic book, The Eudaemonic Pie, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, describes another groups attempts to beat roulette with prediction.
Along the way they encounter a croupier who always bets his tip money on 17. Why? “Because if I do everything just right, I can actually hit seventeen. Not that I can do it every time, mind you, but I can get close to it. I set the wheel going at a steady rate, and then I flip the ball in this nice regular way when the zero is lined up in front of me, and I swear I can hit seventeen with better-than-average odds.”
