Do you think advantage players are cheaters?
You have to keep in mind the spirit of the machines. Video poker machines are meant to play poker. If you can somehow find an edge in poker itself that gives you an advantageous position, I'd be for it. Exploiting the software that runs the game, however, isn't fair.
The punishment was blown monstrously out of proportion, but yes, I still think what they did was wrong (and certainly against the law!).
If he had outsmarted or even figured out a way to control the random number generator through button presses, I'd be all for him. But this is more like finding an ATM that has a bug to not record withdrawals of exactly $420 and then emptying the machine.
It's shouldn't be lost that the casinos love to let players think they have an advantage, even they don't. The old joke is that casinos have a word for people who have a system to beat the house: "Welcome!"
Imagine if you're playing, say, blackjack with a human dealer. After you win a hand but before you collect your winnings, you ask the dealer, "Say, would you mind if I retroactively increase my bet and collect the winnings on that?" The dealer replies, "Sure thing," and pays you accordingly.
I imagine we'd all agree that there's no harm in asking, and that the dealer's compliance is his own problem and a problem for his employer but not your problem. Why does this suddenly change when you're talking to a computer instead of a human? I'm not saying it doesn't change, but I can't entirely figure out why we approach these two scenarios so differently.
For your ATM comparison, it's not uncommon for excessively-clever bank customers to jokingly ask the teller for a million bucks, often in response to a question like, "Is there anything else I can do for you today?" Suppose you found a particularly dim teller who decided to actually hand over a million bucks when you asked. We'd blame the teller and the bank for agreeing to such a thing, not the person who asked, right? Yet when it's an ATM instead of a teller, we blame the person asking.
If the dealer decides to deviate from the rules, the dealer has committed a crime. The player could also be an accomplice if he was in cohorts with the dealer.
Now in the case of the buggy slot machine, the software has been checked to NOT perform this action. If it does, it's obviously deviating from the rules as well and needs to be shut down. To avoid making the player an accomplice, the "malfunction voids all pays" rule comes into play. If the player knowingly made the slot deviate from the rules, then that falls under the definition of cheating.
So, one could argue the 'hack' was no different than this. The probability of paying out was set to 500 to 1 for 1 hand. This is legal for the casino to do, but you turn the tables and a guy goes to jail?
Regardless, this is just more evidence that the 'house always wins' (even when it looses).
Slots are fixed to a given payout percentage and then locked in with the gaming board. Traditionally this means a copy of the program is checksummed and stored offsite with the gaming commission. The officials have the right to open that machine at any time and verify that the program matches what is on record.
Casinos cannot dynamically change this payout percentage on the fly. That's a violation of the law. A casino is required to have a certain average payout across all machines, but that does not mean a particular machine needs to obey that percentage. In fact, the penny slots will be set way lower and the high-denomination slots will be set much higher. The average will hit the target.
The "hack" is theft, plain and simple. Putting aside the ability to re-award jackpots, the player found a way to change denomination of credits post-play. This is the equivalent of winning at a table game and then swapping your $1 chips for $100 chips when the dealer is not looking.
Regardless, when a machine pays out in a way that is against the house, my take is that these guys deserve every cent they earned. The gamblers did nothing that the casinos don't do everyday. That is, use the rules of the game to their advantage (ie. manipulate you to make a decision against your own best interest). In this case the rules of the game were broken in an extremely subtle way.
When you say your friend's casino "manipulated the environment" to extract more money from patrons, that's a bit vague. Is he referring to things done to patrons outside the domain of the slot machine (e.g. comped alcohol/rooms/food, awarding extra player points, show tickets, etc), or actually changing the performance of a machine while the person is playing?
Because the NV gaming law (the one that most other jurisdictions copy when doing their own) has it plain and clear in Regulation 14.040 Section 6:
"[Slots] must not automatically alter pay tables or any function of the device based on internal computation of the hold percentage"
Now back in the day, the payout percentage target was fixed in an EPROM table, which the gaming board held a copy. Things are a bit more complex now with networked slots. The games are now downloading their code from a central server. A slot floor manager can load a new game into the cabinet with a different payout percentage, but it cannot be done while a player is playing and for a fixed amount of time afterward, and then the game must go offline (and say so publicly) for another fixed amount of time after the new game loads. This time is on the order of 10 minutes or more so a player is guaranteed to know that the game is being changed if a slot floor decides to do this.
Really, a casino really doesn't need to play around with slots to make sure they earn money. The math guarantees it. The casino's job is to make sure the players come and stay as long as possible which seems like what your friend was involved with. There's serious work in collecting all that player data and trying to understand ways to maximize the handle.
I don't know about that. Don Johnson, the blackjack player who won more than $15M at the casinos, did so by having them change the rules. He made enough little changes that the odds swung into his favor, and he took the casinos to the cleaners. All valid and legal. From the wiki: He negotiated several changes to standard casino blackjack in order to gain a mathematical edge
(AFAIK it is pretty hard to come up with a system of law that doesn't start with this assumption without it being either completely ineffectual or very oppressive. Whether or not free will exists, it's at least a very handy abstraction for distinguishing good actors from bad ones.)
As far as I can tell, the law is based on a collection of ideas we collectively identify as "justice". In no particular order: that punishment can reform a person so they no longer commit criminal acts, that the threat of punishment can cause a person to refrain from committing criminal acts, and that punishment as revenge is just a good thing.
None of this has anything to do with "free will", whatever it is.
A computer comes to a fork in the road, x == 5 so it goes left, it does not have free will and cannot choose to go right, it always goes left if x == 5.
We can argue "but what about determinism" all day but I'm pretty sure you understand what we mean by "free will" and are just being pedantic.
As far as I can tell, there are three possibilities:
1. The entity has no internal state. Any stimulus always produces the same response.
2. The entity is deterministic and has internal state. The same stimulus does not necessarily produce the same response. The same stimulus combined with the same internal state will always produce the same response.
3. The entity has some random factor in how it works. The same stimulus does not necessarily produce the same response, even with the same internal state.
Which one is "free will"? It's definitely not 1. It doesn't seem to be 2, from how people talk about it. But neither does it seem to be 3, as it's discussed as something more than just randomness. But what else could there be?
A person performs an action, measures how the environment is changed, and modifies their behaviour to get better outcomes (for themselves or other people they care about).
Humans are a bit more sophisticated than a PID controller. While most animals, machines and nature itself are limited to blindly performing actions and measuring the result, people (and crows) can ponder what will happen IF they do something. Several steps ahead. They do not need to perform an action to anticipate the consequence.
When we say the law assumes free will, we mean that the law assumes a good control system. "If you do this we'll put you in a concrete box". The law assumes that threat will work.
This, as it turns out, is a flawed assumption. Many people do not think through their actions (stupid criminals), or they think through their actions and judge them worth the risk (e.g. weed smokers), or they have no other choice of action (e.g. prostitutes).
tl;dr: your rice cooker has free will.
I am not personally sure that I believe this to be a good thing -- the flipside of laws that protect people against themselves is that they may make them less responsible, so care is needed. But I think it is not the case that exploiting bugs in people to get money would be systematically legal.
I do think there is a difference (at least in degree, maybe in nature) between computer and human victims: for computers, we feel justified in estimating that people should know that they are dealing with them, and second-guess what they are supposed to do, so that you are blamed if it can be shown that you "knowingly" make them deviate. (Laws have this interesting way of talking about unverifiable states of mind of people, but there can be clues. Did the gamblers who exploited the bug call it a "bug"? If yes, this suggests that they realized it was unintentional, so you may argue whether it is still fair or not that they exploit it, but you can't compare their situation to someone who would hit the bug in good faith.)
With respect to this difference, I think the law is also designed to account for the pragmatical fact that everyone has entrusted their lives and businesses to the dumb computers, without having the technical skill to be responsible for what they do, so some protection is afforded computers they malfunction and/or if they have been incompetently manufactured or programmed. I often wonder whether this is a good thing. (When you consider that people are responsible for computers they own or operate, you often get interesting moral consequences.)
Many of the richest people around got that way by exploiting some "bug", but no one considers them to have done anything illegal. They find a loophole in banking laws and become a billionaire, or you manipulate people psychologically into buying your products (modern marketing). We call these "business" so it's not illegal to exploit these "bugs".
That is clearly nonsense tho', and that's easy to prove. If you are playing poker with a person, then that is all about exploiting the flaws in that person, this ones timid, that one's reckless, this one has a facial tic, that one drinks too much and so on.
After all, reading other people's tells is what makes poker poker. Why is it suddenly a "bug" if a machine has one?
The entire business of casinos is exploiting a security flaw in the human mind. By hypothesis, the casinos' money should be forfeit, so they have no moral grounds for trying to get it back from the people who found a way to take some of it.
Conversely, if we backtrack and cancel our postulate, then there is no basis for a claim against a gambler who exploits the software.