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"...a documentary I’d seen a while back, where some science-minded gamblers proved that a roulette wheel could reliably be beaten with a timer and a pocket computer.."

I suspect those two gamblers were Claude Shannon, founder of information theory, and Ed Thorp, a physicist who developed a card counting method for blackjack [1].

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-v...

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Documented in "The Eudaemonic Pie" by Thomas Bass. Doyne Farmer is the key guy as I read it. He and other guys went on to Form 'The Prediction Company' (where they used Chaos Theory to play the stock market very successfully – eventually bought by Swiss Bank/now UBS).

I interned in his group (the Center for Nonlinear Studies) at Los Alamos Natl Laboratory between these two events.

I'd suspect not. Rather, I'd suspect it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie , which is about work that was probably inspired by Shannon and Thorp.

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