The Eudaemons - Hoping to Beat the Roulette

The small group of students from The University of California Santa Cruz tried to invent a special device which would tell them the winning numbers of roulette wheel. The head of the group was J. Doyne Farmer and his colleague Norman Packard helped him (both of them were crazy roulette admirer and wanted to do everything possible to reveal all secrets of their favorite game).

This group called themselves to be The Eudaemons (they were just inspired by the philosophy of eudaimonism) and they worked in the late 1970s.

Big Plans

The 2 students have bought their own roulette wheel in order to do their researches to find out the principle of its work; thanks to their attempts, they were able to figure the formula out using the periods of roulette wheels and roulette ball's rotation. But all those calculations were too difficult to remember in order to use them in practice, so, the decision of building a special computer which would do that appeared.

The Eudaemons divided a roulette wheel into octants: so, their aim was not to predict the exact number where a ball will land but the part of a roulette wheel. It took them 2 years to build their computer and finally it was ready. If you think that these guys wanted to become rich thanks to this device you are wrong: they wanted to gather some money playing roulette to fun a scientific community (well, physicists are physicists, nothing to add more here).

Good start.

1978. The group of physicists goes to Las Vegas to use their computer and win some money. This device was invisible for other people and two people were needed to use it: the bettor itself and the observer. The observer had a special small device in his shoe with the help of which he could pass the signal to the bettor (what octant to bet on or not to bet at all): he just had to press his device by his toe. All octants were numbered, so the observer passed the number of an octant which was supposed to be a winning one.

What about the bettor? The bettor had a device on her breast under the shirt: she received signals from the observer - she felt them like small impulses (a small electric shock); J. Doyne Farmer played the role of the observer.

And bad finish

Something went wrong: the bettor kept placing bets even after the observer sent the impulse not to do that; it turned out that the device on her chest had burned a hole in the skin… Almost all members of the group had left the casino by that moment because felt something was wrong. As far as you understand, the device did not work at all; The Eudaemons failed and their 2 leaders took a decision to disband the group.

However, they were able to win $10 000 before that terrible incident had happened and the experiment had been finished. Back to the past, Edward Thorp together with Claude Shannon invented a machine to predict results of roulette in 1961; maybe their example inspired The Eudaemons to repeat this deed