[FRIAM] lurking
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Nov 8 17:51:32 EST 2021
DaveW-
Congratulations (or condolences) on your move to Vegas. Another
reference gave me the sense you might be at least *wintering* there.
I probably would not be surprised (though shocked) by what Casinos can
ban. I didn't mean to suggest that they didn't have the self-granted
authority to ban cell phones, etc. but rather doing so would severely
impact their popularity among the hordes of marks who happily come to
give up their spare (or not so) cash to feed the bright lights and other
egregious displays of wealth.
The Thomas Bass rendition of Farmer et alia foray into exploiting
manufacturing/wear biases in roulette wheels Eudamonic Pie
<https://www.thomasbass.com/the_eudaemonic_pie_1360.htm> suggests that
today the same effort would be "trivial" with nothing more perhaps than
a cell phone camera/computer observing from a shirt pocket. Of
course, those biases have long since been ameliorated one way or another
I am sure.
You describe poker tables as the one place the house has no stake in the
game. I have to admit that i don't know who pays the rent/real-estate
on the table? Is there a flat-rate rake-off from every pot? Does the
dealer live on tips?
When the Native Casinos opened here, my elderDotter was turning 18 and
she had a friend who thought she wanted to grow up to be a blackjack
dealer so they frequented the casino. I don't know that my daughter
lost/spent much money on it, but she never had any illusions that she
could "beat the house". I think their game was blackjack which I
understand has the built-in tiny but positive bias to the house (the
house wins all ties by convention?). I told both daughters as they
approached college that I had saved enough for them to be able to go
through a BS/BA degree with only part-time/summer work contribution (or
healthy scholarship) on their part. I suggested that I cash it out and
take it to the casino and drop it all on red or black (Roulette) with
the understanding that their odds ware just a smidge short of doubling
their money vs losing it all (the one green slot represents the house
advantage?). The conceit was that if they *won* they would then have
enough cash to "coast" through college as *many* of their peers seemed
to be supported or else if they *lost* they could forego any implied
obligation of going to college. They both honestly mulled it for at
least 10 seconds before they rolled their eyes and said "no way!".
I'm curious how you feel about my claim that the inter-personal dynamic
at the poker table is in some sense more important than the technical
skill? My point in your case would be that you would be *at* a table
where the technical skill level was roughly even, right? Tournament
play tends to support that, right? As you advance, the skill level of
your table-peers increases until you either step up YOUR game or fail
out of the game?
I think of you as having a strong mix of technical approach, intuition,
and likely to engage in the social-emotional game as well (e.g. bluffing).
- Steve
On 11/8/21 9:42 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> You would be surprised at what casinos can ban. Maybe even more
> surprised at the, not necessarily AI, software tools they use to
> analyze video feeds and pounce on any kind of statistically
> improbabilities. Most casinos in Vegas have tools, like mandatory side
> bets with very low odds, that erase the near equal odds of blackjack.
>
> The only 'safe' gambling is poker where the house has no direct
> interest in the outcome.
>
> As DES stated, winning is a matter of patience and losing antes only,
> until you get good hand and then skill of playing that hand for
> maximum return — playing less worse than the others at the table.
>
> I am living in Vegas now and playing small tournaments fairly regularly.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2021, at 7:23 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 11/7/21 12:02 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> There must be some kind of “Back to the future” movie that can be
>>> made out of this. Doyne Farmer in Vegas all over again, but with
>>> current-era AI in place of toe-operated computers.
>>
>> Yah! Surely Casinos can't begin to restrict
>> computers(phones)/earbuds, etc. on the gaming floor.
>>
>> Strange coincidence that my sister went to Kindergarten with Vance
>> Packard (Norm's brother) in Silver City long before they all became
>> eagle scouts and then the Chaos Cabal. We moved away the next year
>> and I doubt I ever met any of them back then. I came to LANL just
>> before (I think) Doyne came... I seem to remember that Norm was there
>> for a summer... and soon came the (in)famous CA conference... As I
>> remember it the game of interest (aside from Life, what with Conway
>> in attendance) was GO with a lot of speculation about the
>> implications of local vs global "intelligence"... I was intrigued
>> by HashLife and it's implications for finding structure at many
>> scales... I still hope for someone with more follow-through than I
>> have to implement a more redundant but "thorough" space-time
>> decomposition (an N-1xN-1 kernel over the 4 positions at each "zoom"
>> level).
>>
>> Regarding poker.. I played some low-stakes in college and saw there
>> were two things to take in: the main technical skill was to simply
>> play less poorly than the other players at the table and that was
>> entirely overshadowed by the social-engineering games of bluffing,
>> etc. The very simple game-theoretic aspect of not depleting your
>> own stake before you catch a "lucky streak" going your way was also a
>> good understanding. I played with my "boss" and a number of peers
>> at the time and realized that it was more about jockeying for
>> position at work and drinking beer than it was about winning/losing.
>> I think the most I ever lost/won was on the order of $20-$40 which in
>> those days was roughly 1-2 shifts wages... a LOT if I joined them
>> weekly... too rich for my blood! I still feel that *technically*
>> playing well really means just playing less badly. Blackjack being
>> even more obviously so?
>>
>>>
>>> Yikes.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Nov 7, 2021, at 1:56 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
>>>> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My inclination would be to invest in standoff biometrics (e.g.
>>>> Eulerian Video Amplification) and then find the best poker playing
>>>> code. It ought to be possible to automate and perhaps get rich in
>>>> the process.
>>>>
>>>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>>>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>>*On Behalf Of*Eric Charles
>>>> *Sent:*Sunday, November 7, 2021 7:42 AM
>>>> *To:*The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>>>> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>>>> *Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>>>
>>>> I DID read all the thread so far... but I'm curious how we got to
>>>> one of the starting points: "as cringy as it may be for some dork
>>>> to be proud of their Poker prowess"
>>>>
>>>> I am somewhat satisfied with my Poker mediocrity, certainly not
>>>> proud of it... but if I met someone who was ACTUALLY
>>>> startlingly better than I am, and they were proud of that, I
>>>> wouldn't find it cringy. (Ditto in my other hobbies, like Aikido.)
>>>>
>>>> I guess if I met someone who had a slight edge in their drunk-buddy
>>>> home games, and they were super proud of THAT, then i would find it
>>>> cringy. (Ditto someone who's the best Aikido student in their small
>>>> dojo, but who's obviously not more than that.)
>>>>
>>>> When I see academic work on game theory, it's usually of lower
>>>> quality than what the good poker players are doing these days.
>>>> Mastering the game is crazy hard, and being able to sit down and
>>>> implement a coherent and winning strategy for 40-80 hours a week is
>>>> not easy. So... why would that be cringe?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Nov 3, 2021 at 1:42 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
>>>> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Ok, part of the story is knowing what is really needed for
>>>> reproducibility as a function of context.
>>>> With that, then there's the matter of how much control is
>>>> afforded. Is it programmable in predictable ways?
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>>>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, November 3, 2021 8:20 AM
>>>> To:friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, I agree. But context is Queen. When the virus is created
>>>> in the lab, it's done with real stuff distilled from the soupy
>>>> world. Given enough of a difference in context, the robot may
>>>> not be able to re-constitute the life because the soupy world
>>>> surrounding the robot doesn't have the real stuff required.
>>>> Such drastic context changes could be a result of translation
>>>> through space or time. E.g. trying to construct, on Mars, an
>>>> organism read/serialized on earth. Or e.g. trying to construct
>>>> an organism read millennia ago, millennia in the future. It's
>>>> naive to talk about "science" as if any given read-out formula
>>>> thereby expressed is *complete*. Science is abstraction to a
>>>> large extent ... maybe not as abstracting as math, of course.
>>>> And science must remain "open" precisely because any formula it
>>>> expresses is suspect, perhaps incomplete.
>>>>
>>>> My favorite example is the magic brewing
>>>> stick:https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/
>>>> <https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/>It
>>>> *was* scientific to lay out the magic stick as a critical
>>>> element of the brewing process, only to discover later that the
>>>> stick isn't the important part.
>>>>
>>>> On 11/2/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> > Even if that were so, viruses have been pulled from history
>>>> or tweaked and created in the lab. So we have a design
>>>> specification, and the means to make it. One could imagine a
>>>> robot fabricating the close-to-the-metal machine too. There
>>>> is a story one can write down how it is done. If there is no
>>>> story, it is not science we are talking about, it is something
>>>> else.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
>>>> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
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