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Gaming the system: Edward Thorp and the wearable computer that beat Vegas
"My name is Edward Thorp." "My name is Edward Thorp." "My name is Edward Thorp." It's 1964 and Edward Thorp is on the television game show To Tell The Truth, sitting alongside two other well-dressed men also claiming to be Edward Thorp, a man so adept at card counting that he'd been barred from Las Vegas casinos. Thorp, the quiet man on the right, every bit the mathematics professor with black-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, is the real deal. Two years earlier, Thorp's book, Beat the Dealer, was published, explaining the system for winning at blackjack he developed based on the mathematical theory of probability. The system worked so well that Las Vegas casinos actually changed the rules of blackjack to give the dealer an added advantage. Those changes would prove to be short-lived, but Thorp's book would go on to become a massive bestseller, and remains a key guide to the game of blackjack to this day. That all this happened as the computer age was flourishing in the 1960s isn't coincidental. While working to beat the house, Thorp was also working at one of the hotbeds of that revolution: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he had access to two things that would prove invaluable to his research. One was the room-filling IBM 704 computer, without which, he writes in Beat the Dealer, "the analysis on which this book is based would have been impossible."
Distro Issue 107: How Edward Thorp gambled his way into wearable-tech history
Edward Thorp was banned from casinos in Vegas for counting cards. He even published a book on his system for winning at the blackjack table using the mathematical theory of probability. While working at MIT, he built what many consider the first wearable device for -- you guessed it -- beating roulette. In a fresh issue of our weekly, Donald Melanson profiles Thorp's gaming of the system and how he ended up the unlikely father of wearable computing. Eyes-On has a look at Sennheiser's cans, Hands-on grabs up both of the new iPhones and IRL takes a gaming focus. Jump down to your digital library of choice to snag your copy and settle in for a gadget-centric history lesson. Distro Issue 107 PDF Distro in the iTunes App Store Distro in the Google Play Store Distro in the Windows Store Distro APK (for sideloading) Like Distro on Facebook Follow Distro on Twitter
