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Duane Wise
, April 19, 2007
I am buying this book as a gift to a bright high school graduate. It is an engrossing story of inspiration teetering on obsession, the ephemeral and the ingenious attempt to make it concrete. Physics grad students at Cal-Santa Cruz study the then-new discipline of chaos theory, the modeling of normal behavior when it starts to break down, such as water when it begins to boil. They do this while working on an unintended application: the modeling of a moving roulette wheel and ball for predicting the outcome using hidden miniature electronics. They calculate that even if this system works moderately well, the result is a significant advantage over the house.
The great positive about this book is that the story is true and the people are real (Google 'the eudaemons' and see for yourself). The minor drawback is that these events happened 25 years ago, and the state of today's technology may obscure the truly remarkable achievement these students perform. The electronics they work with are stone tools compared to today. I read recently of a group of Eastern Europeans caught with a roulette predictor based on lasers. I shudder to think what the Eudaemons would be able to do with that technology. In my opinion, this book blows away any Ocean's N+1 movie. Let the casinos beware.
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