Came here to say the same thing. Brilliant book. A team of physicists created a computer to track a roulette ball and wheel with sufficient accuracy to gain a whopping 40% advantage over the house. Their hardware was never reliable enough (in terms of not catching on fire, the predictions were good) to make much money. Doyne Farmer, a member of the team basically invented the field of chaos theory, then went on to make a fortune on Wall Street.