Cheating at Roulette Without Cheating

I loved this long Bloomberg piece about cheating at roulette.

It's a bit of a shaggy dog story, so I won't spoil it too much...

...but I'm about to spoil it a little, so, if that bothers you, stop reading here, and come back later!

I loved the story because I intimately understand the skill involved. Watch long enough - just watch! - and any not-totally-random system becomes at least somewhat predictable, whether you "understand it" or not.

The writer, having lavished 6000 words on telling the tale, couldn't really dive into the juicy hows and wheretos, even if he had the insight to do so. But this is something I previously wrote about here (and continued here). 

Those postings weren't so much about what you can do with this faculty as how to access the faculty itself - and use it to incrementally work up curves of diminishing results (I'm not sure anyone's ever explained this before; it's yet more perceptual framing stuff). But I did offer a few practical applications:

My Guatemalan superstar contractor has a fatal flaw. He can't estimate jobs. A pragmatic man, his head swims with potential snags. And if an unanticipated problem absorbs extra time, he might find himself below the weekly income he needs to feed his kids (and the kids of his workers). That outcome terrifies him, so he estimates crazy high (most customers just pay him by the hour). Here's how I advised him:

Whenever you start a job, flash a number in your head of what you think the job will cost the customer. Don't try hard! Don't mull it over, or get out your calculator. Just let a number frivolously, stupidly float into your mind. A two second operation, if that.

Then, when the job's complete, see how close you came. Don't try to learn from your mistakes. Don't analyze short/longfall. Just note the disparity, shrug playfully, and move on. And keep doing this, over and over and over. In way less time than you'd imagine - weeks or months, not years - you'll find your guesses getting more and more accurate until you're eventually nailing the exact figure every time. All without even trying! Hey, trying hard never worked, anyhow, right?

This is something our spidey-sense recognizes as possible, because we brush against this mysterious facility from time to time. For example, many people claim the superpower of always knowing the precise time when they wake up. They've guessed it many times, as a mere playful caprice (more on that essential part in a moment), and gotten incrementally better and better at it. After a few hundred iterations, one becomes weirdly infallible. It's like a magic trick no one ever really examined.

I discussed the whole thing (the Bloomberg article plus my Slog post) with a biologist friend:

Me: Any system that delivers a rational result, even if you have no idea of the algorithm, becomes highly predictable just from subconscious matching (if you playfully predict and don’t try to dig too deep).

Friend: Yes. It can also be determined statistically. Play long enough, and the small odds make a difference

Me: Can really see this in any computer game you play a lot. You find yourself able to eerily predict things that really shouldn’t be predictable without conscious effort/calculation.

Friend: Yeah. Our brains probably perform some sort of statistical inference

Me: Yeah, you need to clear out the thicket of narrative and emotional thinking, while maintaining just the slightest, playful desire for improvement. Mulish repetition never gets better. You need that spark..

Friend: And the feedback

Me: Yeah, don’t ignore the feedback. Note the result. Calmly!

Friend: Our brains are a reinforcement system

Me: Yes, and I guess my point is that it’s all pretty under the hood, subconscious

Friend: yeah

Me: Any way you strain to improve it is counterproductive

Friend: The intrinsic system is already quite optimised

Me: Right. Lots of biological processes are like that.

Friend: Millions of years of evolution

Me: All you can do is interfere! Zen saying: “All calculation is miscalculation”

Friend: LOL!


Note that if I started out with that Zen saying and tried to work backwards, explaining it, my highly rational friend likely would never have grokked it. But the conversation had reached a point where he was forced to seriously entertain it, if not entirely swallow it!