This post isn’t strictly within the purview of Irreal but I think it will appeal to the nerd in all of us. Most of you know that a perfect roulette wheel produces completely random results but, of course, no wheel is perfect. No matter how well manufactured, wear and environmental conditions collude to ensure nonrandom behavior and that nonrandomness provides an opportunity for a player to change the odds in their favor.
Years ago, I read The Eudaemonic Pie, an account of an early attempt to smuggle a small, homemade, specialized computer into a casino. The computer’s job was calculate the trajectory of the roulette ball and predict which third of the wheel it would end up in. It turns out that that wasn’t the first attempt at such a thing. Physicist Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon(!) did the same thing in the 1960s but, like the Eudaemons, they had trouble keeping their homegrown computer operating in the less than idea conditions of a casino.
A recent Bloomberg’s Businessweek article picks up the story in 2004 with an account of Niko Tosa and his successful war against the odds at the roulette table. Tosa and his associates would go into a casino, play the roulette wheel, and walk away with a bunch of casino money. The casinos, of course, have no sense of humor at all about this sort of thing and did everything they could to catch Tosa and his colleagues cheating. They even brought in the police who searched them for computers or other devices but could find nothing.
To this day it’s still not known how they did it. The casinos responded by barring Tosa but he still tries to get in—usually unsuccessfully—by wearing disguises. It’s a story that I’m sure will appeal to your innernerd. It’s not just the technical details but the whole idea of a ragtag bunch of guys hacking the man.