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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 Newton

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.

anfractuosity 9y ago
Cheers, just ordered that :) There seems to be lots of used copies pretty cheap on amazon.
tzs 9y ago
You can apparently borrow this book online for 14 days: https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass It's also available on Kindle for $7.99: https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass-ebook/dp/B06XGM7K64/ https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass-ebook/dp/B... They also have it as an audio book on Audible. Note: this book is about a different, later group that built a wearable computer to hack roulette rather than Shannon and Thorp. Shannon and Thorp's work is mentioned a bit, but most of the book is about Farmer, Packard and associates, and the Shannon and Thorp work is discussed more as general background to help in understanding Farmer and Packard's work. Farmer and Packard do not seem to have been aware of any details of Shannon and Thorp's work. They had read Thorp's book on blackjack, and Thorp mentions briefly that he had way to beat roulette but had not implemented it yet. When Packard and Farmer read that, they were skeptical. Later, they independently came up with the idea of using physics to predict roulette, and only after that did they realize that this was what Thorp was getting at, too. I don't recall anything in the book indicating that they knew Shannon had been involved with Thorp. They made use of Shannon's work in areas such as information theory when trying to understand chaos and apply it to roulette, of course. It has been over 30 years since I read the book, so I possibly missed something (although just before posting this I found my copy and skimmed the first 60 pages, which covered up to where Packard and Farmer got the idea and started working on implementing it).
- robinhouston 9y ago
  Thanks! It’s remarkably reassuring to hear from someone else who remembers it. And thanks for the extra detail.
dizzystar 9y ago
You can also check out Fortune's Formula, which has a lot of information about Shannon, Kelly and Thorpe. It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.

anfractuosity 9y ago

Cheers, just ordered that :) There seems to be lots of used copies pretty cheap on amazon.

tzs 9y ago

You can apparently borrow this book online for 14 days: https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass It's also available on Kindle for $7.99: https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass-ebook/dp/B06XGM7K64/ https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Thomas-Bass-ebook/dp/B... They also have it as an audio book on Audible. Note: this book is about a different, later group that built a wearable computer to hack roulette rather than Shannon and Thorp. Shannon and Thorp's work is mentioned a bit, but most of the book is about Farmer, Packard and associates, and the Shannon and Thorp work is discussed more as general background to help in understanding Farmer and Packard's work. Farmer and Packard do not seem to have been aware of any details of Shannon and Thorp's work. They had read Thorp's book on blackjack, and Thorp mentions briefly that he had way to beat roulette but had not implemented it yet. When Packard and Farmer read that, they were skeptical. Later, they independently came up with the idea of using physics to predict roulette, and only after that did they realize that this was what Thorp was getting at, too. I don't recall anything in the book indicating that they knew Shannon had been involved with Thorp. They made use of Shannon's work in areas such as information theory when trying to understand chaos and apply it to roulette, of course. It has been over 30 years since I read the book, so I possibly missed something (although just before posting this I found my copy and skimmed the first 60 pages, which covered up to where Packard and Farmer got the idea and started working on implementing it).

robinhouston 9y ago
Thanks! It’s remarkably reassuring to hear from someone else who remembers it. And thanks for the extra detail.

dizzystar 9y ago

You can also check out Fortune's Formula, which has a lot of information about Shannon, Kelly and Thorpe. It's a horrible name for a book, but a great read.