Last Wednesday, I wrote about the 3 Eastern Europeans that used their cell phones to will $2.5 million from a British casino. Well, I decided to delve further into the case, just to see what came up and I found an article in of all places NewScientist.com. In this article the scientist not only breaks down the system, but mentions alternatives.
The author of the article consults Dr. Norman Packard, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. But he's not just any normal, run of the mill physicist. He actually developed a a computer system that his students strapped to their bodies and controlled by tapping their toes in the 1970's.
The system itself was successful, but practical use was hard to employ.
Moving forward 30 years to our Eastern European friends situation, Packard states that the quadrant of the wheel where the ball will land can be predicted simply by working out 2 equations, one for the ball and one for the wheel. He said that there are variables though, such as the mass and size of the ball, the shape and roughness of the track, and the tilt of the wheel.
He says the the British caper could have been further simplified by the perpetrators. He said that if instead of scanners, they used the buttons on the phones when the ball was released and then after one spin and pressed them to mark the speed, that a remote computer, or perhaps even one in the phone, could then solve the equations "very rapidly".
The article goes on to talk about the odds of winning by his method, talking about how the casinos can beat his method and why he stopped his own research. It makes for a good read and the article just goes to show that there are a lot of ways to overcome a situation. If you would like to read the entire text of the article, you can do so here.
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