Musing on a slot-machine challenge I saw on Facebook recently, I remembered a story about students building a computer to try to “crack” roulette - turns out they were quite successful. Here’s a little video on it:
What I found more amazing was that they did it in 1977 using a 6502 although digging deeper I do wonder if it might have been the 6507 variant which could only address 8KB as the device had 3KB of ROM and 5KB of RAM. The entire computer and battery fitted inside a shoe with feedback being somewhat interestingly little electric shocks applied via wires stuck to the users chests. This was not without issues and in one case it burned a hole through the wearers flesh… In that 3KB of ROM they fitted timing code, trig code and the other stuff needed to make it work.
Doing a little more research, however, I found that this was not the first attempt at it and a previous one in the early 60s seemed to have an even higher probability of predicting wins. This was a dedicated circuit built using transistors and used an earpiece to deliver information back to the wearer…
Today “wearable computing” is a bit of a thing with some people, but this is a whole new retro take on it all…
This week, wearable computing, with the in-shoe 6502 computer to help you cheat at roulette. (Not legal in all jurisdictions.)
"1978 (C) Eudaemonic Enterprises invents a digital wearable computer in a shoe to predict roulette wheels…
Using a CMOS 6502 microprocessor with 5K RAM, Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, and others created a shoe computer with toe-control and inductive radio communications between a data taker and better. This is the only known roulette machine of the time to show a statistical profit on a gambling run, though they never made the “big score.” See book: The Eudaemonic Pie (1985) "
More photos at http://eyetap.org/wearcam/eudaemonic/
where you’ll see the 6502 and another 40-pin device are in the front of the shoe, with the swappable battery pack in heel.
Note that Shannon and Thorpe also had a wearable roulette cheating device even earlier, in the early 60s, but it was probably an analogue computer. Yes, that Shannon.
