[FRIAM] lurking

[Eric Charles]

Lol.... ok.... but also there are plenty of Casino's available with no
smoking.... Welcome to The Future.

<echarles at american.edu>


On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 8:32 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Remind me never to go to a casino.  The last time I was in one was to meet
> my lawyer whose office was in ABQ for lunch so we could split the driving
> time.  I almost choked from the cigarette smoke.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2021, 6:09 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
>> SteveS,
>>
>> Your intuitions are spot on, based on my experience. Although casinos
>> can't ban cell phones, you may not use one at the table - must step away
>> and not have a hand in play. The do detect and ban all kinds of electronic
>> transmissions — radio to infrared and if you have such a transmitter on
>> your person you are quickly escorted out and banned. Receivers are harder
>> to detect except when actively 'receiving' but same result if discovered.
>>
>> Blackjack has a published 'standard game' written up years ago — casinos
>> will actually give you a copy — that maximizes the players odds of winning,
>> at least long term. However there are lots of tricks employed to remove
>> even that vestige of a chance, like mandatory side bets, and paying even
>> odds instead of 3/2 for a blackjack if your bet is below some minimum.
>>
>> Casinos are also masters of facial recognition — probably better tech
>> than anything any government (including China) or Facebook can command.
>> Once banned, even hookers, you will never get more than a few feet into a
>> big casino before security descends — even if disguised.
>>
>> Cash game poker, the house takes a standard rake — 10% up to a limit — of
>> the pot as table rent and dealers receive tips plus a minimum wage hourly
>> rate. Seniority determines which dealers get to service the high limit
>> (hence high tips) tables.
>>
>> Tournaments: house takes a portion of the entry fee and rest goes into
>> pot. Dealers get hourly rate, plus tips are collected from winners and
>> distributed evenly.
>>
>> Poker is luck plus very astute inter-personal observation. One of my
>> favorite players, Daniel Negreanu, has a Master Class that provides all
>> kinds of technical skill, but he does not play that way, instead seat of
>> the pants observations and table talk determine his strategy. Not that he
>> is unaware of or lacks the technical chops, they are just not the ultimate
>> arbitrator of play — mostly because all the others in tournaments at his
>> level have the same degree of technical skill.
>>
>> I did some consulting to casinos a few years back when Highlands was
>> trying to start a casino / hospitality program. I have never seen such
>> sophisticated and secure systems before or since.
>>
>> James Swain has a series of mystery books — first in series is *Grift
>> Sense* — with plots that center on one major attempt to defraud a casino
>> and many little side plots that reveal all the different attempts to
>> "cheat" casinos. Fun reads.
>>
>> A strategy for short term winning at roulette: bet 10 each on two of the
>> 1/3 sections of the table (rows or columns) plus one of the 1:1 sections
>> (even/odd, red/black, top half-bottom have of the board), plus 1 dollar on
>> the 0-00 line (half odds but both covered).  However, this will not work if
>> you play more than a 10-15 minutes because it only takes 4.5 times when
>> none of your bets hit before you are wiped out. This apparently works
>> because the wheel DOES have a bias, mostly from the way the dealer sends
>> the ball around the wheel. Watch the history board for patterns that reveal
>> the ever so slight but real bias.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 8, 2021, at 3:51 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> 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> 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> *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>
>> *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>
>> 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> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>> Sent: Wednesday, November 3, 2021 8:20 AM
>> To: 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/
>>  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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