Experimental result: Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Persi Diaconis. The model asserts that when people flip an … Read More “Coin Flips Are Biased” »
Category: gambling
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Many years ago, Matt Blaze and I talked about getting our hands on a casino-grade automatic shuffler and looking for vulnerabilities. We never did it—I remember that we didn’t even try very hard—but this article shows that we probably would have found non-random properties: …the executives had recently discovered that one of their machines had … Read More “On the Randomness of Automatic Card Shufflers” »
Interesting story: The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms — known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs — that govern how slot machine games behave. Armed with this knowledge, he can predict when certain games are likeliest to spit out moneyinsight that he shares with a legion of field agents … Read More “Hacking Slot Machines by Reverse-Engineering the Random Number Generators” »
Attackers used a vulnerability in an Internet-connected fish tank to successfully penetrate a casino’s network. BoingBoing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Wired is reporting on a new slot machine hack. A Russian group has reverse-engineered a particular brand of slot machine — from Austrian company Novomatic — and can simulate and predict the pseudo-random number generator. The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy … Read More “Predicting a Slot Machine's PRNG” »
An impressive Chinese device that automatically reads marked cards in order to cheat at poker and other card games. Powered by WPeMatico
“The next time you call for assistance because the Internet service in your home is not working, the ‘technician’ who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent. He will have secretly disconnected the service, knowing that you will naturally call for help and — when he shows up at your door, … Read More “The Limits of Police Subterfuge” »