Newtonian Casino
by Thomas A. Bass · first published 1990
88% recommend13% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Narrative account of the Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard team who built a wearable computer to beat roulette, appealing to engineers and readers who enjoy science stories with an entertaining, human angle.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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The Newtonian Casino is a book that tells Farmer's story. It is fascinating and I've read it twice: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Newtonian-Casino-Thomas-Bass/dp/...
on “Roulette beater spills physics behind victory” ↗Previously, decades ago, the state of the art in roulette cheating: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-Scie...
on “Exposing high-end poker cheating devices” ↗There is a wonderful book about this by Thomas Bass, which I adored as a teenager in the early ’90s. My British copy (which I still have) is entitled The Newtonian Casino, but I gather the original US edition was called The Eudaemonic Pie. I’ve often wondered why this book isn’t better known. I would recommend it.
on “Claude Shannon built a machine to game roulette (2017)” ↗An interesting article. Some of those things are mentioned in the classic hacker book "The Newtonian Casino" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-Scien...)
on “How casinos distract” ↗…remember reading it and wondering whether they’d have had more chance of making their fortunes building home computers out of their garages given the era! Great story though (I read the British edition - The Newtonian Casino)
on “A professor who beat roulette” ↗+1 the book is entertaining (esp for engineers). Also was released under the title "The Newtonian Casino".
on “The Gambler Who Beat Roulette” ↗I think you'd enjoy the book "The Newtonian Casino".
on “Falling Chinese Space Station to Crash This Weekend” ↗The Newtonian Casino talks about some students who designed a predicting computer, and smuggled it into a casino in their shoe. It was published in 1985, so anything they built would have been considerably less powerful…
on “Big data and poker-playing bots are blurring the line between man and machine” ↗For non-Brits, "The Newtonian Casino" is probably more commonly known as "The Eudaemonic Pie". It's about a group in the 70s using electronic devices to clock roulette wheels to predict the general area of the wheel the ball would fall…
on “Show HN: Hacking slot machines with a buttonhole camera and brute-force search” ↗In The Newtonian Casino (Might be called something else in the US) students who built computers in their shoes (in the 1970s!) to predict the outcome of roulette wheels discovered that lots of wheels had pretty severe tilts…
on “I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs” ↗There's a book "The Newtonian Casino" which describes doing something similar with roulette wheels .. in the 1980s.
on “Race Conditions == Random Number Generation” ↗