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“think” — 2017/9/4 — 17:46 — page 119 — #129
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7.3. THE EUDAEMONIC PIE
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Apple. Nonetheless, the germ of Silicon Valley existed (Fairchild Electronics, for instance) and computer parts could be had. They designed a computer that could be hidden in the heel of a shoe. The Chaos Cabal had teams of two people. One person was the “observer” and the other was the bettor (the one who places the bets). The observer takes in data on which numbers come up most frequently on the given roulette wheel. It is he/she who wears the computer in his/her shoe. He/she enters data into his/her shoe computer by tapping the foot. The data is then conveyed by radio to the bettor, and the bettor then knows what bets to make. It turns out that the Cabal system actually gave them a 44% edge against the house. The potential to make money was really there! And they actually had investors whose money they could risk in the scheme. There are three things that went wrong with the system developed by the Chaos Cabal: • The rate at which they made money was not fast enough for the investors, so the investors eventually evaporated. • The circuitry of the “eye in the sky” cameras that every casino uses to monitor dishonest croupiers and cheating customers interfered with the radio circuitry of the shoe computers. • The members of the teams became so nervous that they sweated copiously and shorted out their electronics. Of course casinos do not like people who try to beat the system using extracurricular means. If the Chaos Cabal people had been caught, then at the least they would have been banned from the casino. In the worst case scenario they would have been dragged into the back room and “worked over” (this would have included verbal and psychological harassment; the sort of physical harassment that you saw in Robert De Niro’s movie Casino seems to have gone by the wayside). There are many stories of techies and math people cooking up schemes to beat the casinos. One of the most famous ones is that of Edward Thorp who, in 1962, wrote the book Beat the Dealer [THOR1]. This volume told of a very sophisticated card-counting scheme that allowed one to win at the card
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