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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a contingent bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one

The funny thing about Roulette is not the hardware but the fact that the random sequence begins with a human being.

I can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously) releasing the ball with the same velocity and direction at the same wheel speed. When you do the job for hours on end wouldn't it be plausible that there's some amount of muscle memory that takes over?

Having watched a few a work in my lifetime it sure seems like they even take it as a challenge to try and work up duplicate numbers. Maybe as a 'fuck the house' move, a cure for boredom, or perhaps a way to drum up more business when you get a streak on the tote board? Who knows.

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> I can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously) releasing the ball with the same velocity and direction at the same wheel speed.

I can believe that too, but that's not the claim being made here. The claim is that the bias was bound to particular roulette wheels, not particular croupiers. Also, even if a croupier had a reliable contingent bias, you'd still need a ridiculous number of data points to figure that out.

There might be hidden variables. Maybe the previous results are a sign that a particular croupier is working that day, which is why you can count on some specific bias for the next numbers.

I.e. some hidden process is causing both of the events, the first event is not causing the second. What you will observe is a high probably of the second event conditioned on the first.

> Maybe the previous results are a sign that a particular croupier is working that day

A more reliable indicator would be, oh, I don't know, looking at the croupier's face and seeing who it is? Just an idea.

Ok, maybe the croupier is not a "hidden" variable, but it could be whether he had coffee that day, which roulette wheel is being used, the lighting conditions in the room, whether he was able to park in front of the building or had to walk from the parking lot, etc. Any event that happens some of the time and causes 1, 2, 3 as the first three numbers can very well be causing a specific distribution of the next numbers.

I.e. correlation doesn't imply causation but translates to dependent probability distributions and therefore a "if A then B is likely" just because A can be observed before B.

If a croupier really was influencing the outcome of the spin, consciously or not, it would involve the exact moment when he dropped the ball. E.g. every time he would drop it in the area of the 10, it would end up in the area of the 3. But in that case there is no point in observing previous roulette outcomes as was described in the article. You would have to observe the croupier instead and the moment he was dropping the ball.

Either the article is not describing accurately what happened or the whole story was BS. There is no way that a croupier or roulette wheel is influenced by the previous drop of the ball.

This is believable to me because I can force the results of a coin toss.

I'm not really sure how, but some tactile awareness of a coin's weight, air pressure, what side is currently facing up, etc. must all factor in.

For context, I am trained as a magician (so there's a degree of mastery of the properties of coins, and fine muscle control), but this is not a magic trick

What is your success rate?

I haven't tracked it in a clinical, laboratory setting.

But if we were in a bar and you bet me $100 bucks that I couldn't get heads 20 times in a row I'd feel comfortable taking the bet

About 50%

> can honestly believe that a bored roulette croupier could reproduce an outcome by consciously (or unconsciously)

The fantastic book, The Eudaemonic Pie, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, describes another groups attempts to beat roulette with prediction.

Along the way they encounter a croupier who always bets his tip money on 17. Why? “Because if I do everything just right, I can actually hit seventeen. Not that I can do it every time, mind you, but I can get close to it. I set the wheel going at a steady rate, and then I flip the ball in this nice regular way when the zero is lined up in front of me, and I swear I can hit seventeen with better-than-average odds.”

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