Shannon and Thorp Hack the Roulette Wheel

It was in this tinkerer’s laboratory that they set out to understand how roulette could be gamed, ordering “a regulation roulette wheel from Reno for $1,500,” a strobe light, and a clock whose hand revolved once per second. Thorp was given inside access to Shannon in all his tinkering glory:

Gadgets . . . were everywhere. He had a mechanical coin tosser which could be set to flip the coin through a set number of revolutions, producing a head or tail according to the setting. As a joke, he built a mechanical finger in the kitchen which was connected to the basement lab. A pull on the cable curled the finger in a summons. Claude also had a swing about 35 feet long attached to a huge tree, on a slope. We started the swing from uphill and the downhill end of the arc could be as much as 15 or 20 feet above the ground. . . . Claude’s neighbors on the Mystic lake were occasionally astounded to see a figure “walking on the water.” It was me using a pair of Claude’s huge styrofoam “shoes” designed just for this.

And yet, Thorp wrote, what impressed him more than any of the gadgets was his host’s uncanny ability to “see” a solution to a problem rather than to muscle it out with unending work. “Shannon seemed to think with ‘ideas’ more than with words or formulas. A new problem was like a sculptor’s block of stone and Shannon’s ideas chiseled away the obstacles until an approximate solution emerged like an image, which he proceeded to refine as desired with more ideas.”

Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (2017718)

• gambling
• hacking
• play