Thomas Bass wrote a book called The Eudaemonic Pie in 1985 about a group of graduate physics students. I’d heard about it, but hadn’t read it, until I picked it up for a dollar in a used book store.
When I subsequently recently attended a lecture by Doyne Farmer, one of those students, their early escapades came back in memory. Doyne Farmer is now a well respected complex systems scientist and academic (and entrepreneur) focusing on predicting economics, financial markets and impact of climate change.
The Eudaemonic Pie book describes how in the late 1970s a group of students at the University of California, Santa Cruz got interested in the developing theories of chaos. How a seemingly random event can have predictable consequences. The butterfly flapping its wings to impact the course or strength of a hurricane hundreds of miles away.
These students (known as the Eudaemons) were reading about the work of Shannon and Thorp, whose focus was the roulette wheel, a device that most regard as a random number generator. Shannon and Thorp deduced that rather than accepting it as a real random generator you can capture the state of the ball and wheel and compute an outcome probability. This increases the confidence in predicting the number the ball will land on by a substantial amount. Not so random after all, they argued.
Getting exited by this idea, and at the same time the first Apple computer was being invented, based on the 6502 microprocessor, the students developed one of the first wearable computers based on the same chip.
It was a device worn under one armpit, with a set of batteries to power it worn under the other. Input was provided by switches in the shoes, wires running up the leg. On the stomach an ‘output’ device (a radio) was worn, designed to send a signal with the outcome of the computation. The shoe based switches were used to send a signal when the ball was released and a second signal was clocked indicating where the ball was about 15 seconds later. The computer program had to fit in the small amount of memory available, around 3,000 bytes. It didn’t compute a specific number, but instead it computed the slice of the wheel the ball would likely end up in.
Testing in a casino involved 2 people. One is the data-collector, wearing the computer and observing the wheel. The other is the winner, receiving the computer’s prediction and betting accordingly. This system is based on the customary delay of about 15 seconds between the ball being put on the wheel and the ‘no more bets’ call of the croupier.
Even though it worked, they didn’t get rich as they feared the casino police and encountered equipment malfunctions.
Farmer’s work on roulette was foundational for his later research in chaos theory and complex systems. He demonstrated that with the right tools and data, seemingly chaotic systems can be understood, and their outcome predicted with reasonable confidence.