The Eudaemonic Pie
Page 1
The Eudaemonic Pie
Thomas A. Bass
The diagram on page 157, from The Casino Gambler’s Guide, Enlarged Edition, by Allan N. Wilson (copyright © 1965, 1970 by Allan N. Wilson), is reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. The lines on page 176 from the song “Hot Blooded,” by Lou Grammatico and Mick Jones, are © 1978 WB Music Corp., Somerset Songs Publishing, Inc. & Evansongs Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The lines on page 183 from “It’s All Right with Me,” by Cole Porter, are copyright © 1953 by Cole Porter. Copyright renewed, assigned to Robert H. Montgomery, Jr., trustee of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trust. Chappell and Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Page numbers noted above refer to the print edition.
To the Eudaemons
Contents
PROLOGUE • Glitter Gulch
ONE • Silver City
TWO • Rambling and Gambling
THREE • Driving Around the Mode Map
FOUR • Radios from Other Planets
FIVE • Debugging
SIX • The Invention of the Wheel
SEVEN • Strange Attractors
EIGHT • Exploring the Envelope
NINE • Lady Luck
TEN • Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions
ELEVEN • Small Is Beautiful
TWELVE • Magic Shoes
THIRTEEN • The City of Computation
FOURTEEN • Rebel Science
FIFTEEN • “Dear Eudaemons”
SIXTEEN • Cleopatra’s Barge
EPILOGUE • The Intergalactic Infandibulum
PROLOGUE
Glitter Gulch
As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare:
He must be a millionaire!
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the hopeful eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo!
“The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”
We drive into the parking garage behind Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Club and circle up the ramp to the third floor.
“We shouldn’t be seen talking to each other,” Doyne says. “Not even in the street. In case there are any slip-ups, we’ll meet later in the Golden Nugget. Why don’t you run through the signals again?”
“A bet on red means I take a five-minute walk. Even means sit down and play. A chip on the first twelve numbers and I raise stakes.”
This is one of the ways we’ll communicate without talking for the next two hours. The other is by computer.
We park the car and lift two pairs of shoes off the rear seat. These are good leather Oxfords with crepe soles. Only on peering inside does one notice that the bottoms are hollowed out. A channel three inches wide and a half inch deep runs from toe to instep. A second cavity is cut into the heel. This is professional work. Uppers and soles have been separated and restitched without a trace.
We reach back for two more shoe boxes. One of them holds our power supplies, known to us as “battery boats” because they look like miniature dories with screw-on lids. The second box holds our computers, which resemble orthopedic insoles with toe clickers built onto the front end. The missing pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, computers and boats fit exactly into the cavities cut out of the shoes. The boats slip prow backward into the heel. The computers snuggle up front under the balls of our feet.
Out of their shoes the components might be mistaken for foot warmers or extraterrestrial tape cassettes. But their beauty lies in what they do: their function is the amazing part.
Molded out of clear casting resin, the battery boats hold eighty turns of hair-thin antenna wire embedded along their outer edge. Built into a circuit inside are a 15-volt battery and four 1.5-volt AAA batteries. From the rear of each boat trails a ribbon cable attached to a model airplane connector. This is a miniature plug with eight pins, each of which corresponds to a different function in the computer—for which the boats act simultaneously as radio receivers, power supplies, and message centers.
Covered with screw-on lids made of polycarbonate “jail glass,” the boats have two metal solenoids the size of pencil erasers sticking out of holes cut into the plastic. Activated by a small current, these mechanical thumpers are positioned to vibrate against the heel and arch of the foot. By varying the location and frequency of these buzzes, a computer driving the solenoids can generate dozens of discrete signals.
Doyne and I unscrew the jail glass and load fresh batteries into the boats. “We’ll use the carbon batteries,” he says. “Our range may be shorter, but they give out less noise.”
Packed with batteries, antenna wire, a capacitor, a resistor, two solenoids, and three diodes, the boats are stuffed to the last millimeter.
“Let’s power up. Then we’ll do a range test and head for the street.”
We insert the model airplane connectors into the rear of the computers. Semitranslucent rectangles wrapped in tape—for comfort in walking on top of them—the computers are the brains of the operation. Under the tape they display top and bottom the silver tracings of printed circuits. For the elect who can read these manuscripts illuminated in copper and solder, they represent glistening avenues and piazzas in the great City of Computation. Lying barely revealed beneath the circuits are a host of capacitors, resistors, and diodes, a crystal clock pointing the arrow of time, and dark fortresses of silicon in which reside the powers of language and logic under the control of one pre-eminent chip endowed with memory.
An experienced eye would be surprised by the arrangement of these silicon boxes. The chips governing the computer’s two basic functions—logic and memory, volition and destiny—have been loaded separately onto circuit boards, which, in turn, have been folded over on top of each other. Imagine upending Tokyo and fitting its skyscrapers, upside down, into the avenues of New York. You get an elegant solution to a topological problem—and a tight fit. Then imagine running a plastic spacer around the waterfront of Manhattan and filling the island with microcrystalline wax—a petroleum derivative as hard as plastic, except at 300° Fahrenheit, when it flows with the viscosity of molasses. Cool the ingredients back to room temperature and you have a Tokyo—New York computer sandwich hard enough to take a blow from a hammer.
In technical terms, we are slipping into our soles a CMOS 6502 microprocessor with five kilobytes of random-access memory. Apple computers are made with the same chip. We carry another 4000 bytes of memory crafted into a program smart enough to beat roulette at a 44 percent advantage. The program—a set of mathematical equations similar to those used by NASA for landing spaceships on the moon—tracks a ball in orbit around a spinning disk of numbers. During the ten to twenty seconds in which the game is played from beginning to end, the computer calculates coefficients of friction and drag, adjusts for changes in velocity, plots relative positions and trajectories, and then announces where in this heavenly cosmos a roulette ball will likely come to rest on a still-spinning rotor. Its predictive power lies in the fact that the computer in our shoes can play out in microseconds a game that in real life takes a million times longer.
A 44 percent advantage is significantly larger than any other gambling system extant. The payout in roulette is thirty-five to one. For every hundred dollars invested—compounded fifty times an hour—one can expect a tidy hourly return of $2200. The money is sweet, but so too is the glory in beating roulette.
After loading boats and computer sandwiches into our shoes, we cover the equipment with leather insoles into which holes have been punched for the solenoids. There are thre
e buzzers altogether: two on the boat and one forward on the sandwich. Programmed to tickle our feet in three different places at three different frequencies, the solenoids produce a total of nine discrete signals. Our socks, too, have neat holes cut into them.
Inside his left shoe Doyne fits a second battery boat and piece of hardware the same shape but slightly smaller than a computer sandwich. A polycarbonate case filled with inverters, transistors, and a radio transmitter, this is the mode switch. Tapping the clicker that hangs off the front end of the switch drives the computer—via a radio link from shoe to shoe—among various modes, or domains, in its program.
Doyne steps out of the car and stands with his big toes positioned over the microswitches in his left and right shoes. His left toe is expert at motoring the computer among subroutines in its program. His right toe is trained for tapping in data. With Doyne’s computer on line and making predictions, another radio link connects it to the computer and solenoids in my right shoe. This gives us a three-footed system, with functions divided between data taker and bettor. Since I have no microswitches under my toes, my role is limited to fielding signals radioed from Doyne’s computer to mine, and placing bets on the layout. I am the front man of the operation, a foil, a mere interpreter of signs tattooed onto the soles of my feet.
I lace up my shoes and step out of the car. I am walking on five years of labor and several thousand dollars worth of soft- and hardware: a state-of-the-art computer. For all that, the shoes don’t do much for my posture. Because of their rigidity, I have to walk in them at a stiff-legged lope. Copper screws, filed to a point, have been mounted on top of the solenoid plungers. The screws allow for a custom fit under the heel and arch of my foot that feels, I imagine, like an application of Vietnamese punji sticks. This latest model in the “Cadillac of roulette systems,” as Doyne calls it, is about to get its first road test.
“Let’s try for range,” he says, walking to the front of the car. “Call off the signals as you get them.”
The desert air in November, even at night, is warm enough for us to stand in our shirt-sleeves. Doyne’s long face is pinched white under its tan. The skin over his cheekbones is nearly translucent. Thin-lipped, his mouth puckers with concentration. His blue eyes, sunk deep, give him the appearance of looking inward, as if over a landscape or a wiring diagram stretched back from his forehead.
With a mop of blond hair curling over his ears, Doyne looks like a west Texas farmboy about to step out for a night on the town. Dressed in chinos and a long-sleeved cotton shirt loud with too many colors, he leans his six-foot frame against the car. Only on looking closely do I see a hint of shoe leather rippling over his toes. “Did you get that?” he asks.
Headlights swing past us on the ramp. We avert our faces as a car circles up to the next level.
“Three,” I say, getting the signal, a high-level buzz on the front solenoid.
“Right. What was that?”
“Nine.”
“And this one?”
“Five. Maybe a six.”
“Let’s hit the street. We haven’t driven five hundred miles from the coast to stand around playing electronic footsie.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a roll of hundred-dollar bills. “Cash in three or four of these. When I give you the sign to raise stakes, cash in a few more.
“How do you feel?” he asks. “Is it your lucky night for gambling?” His face relaxes into a cockeyed grin. “Give me half an hour to get the parameters set. Stop by the table, and I’ll flip you a signal on one of the side bets. If you don’t find me in the Sundance, I’ve moved down to the Golden Gate. And if for some reason I’m not there, look for me in the coffee shop at the Nugget. But watch out. There are two of them. We want the one behind the bar. See you later,” he says, loping toward the elevator with the peculiar gait of someone wearing a computer in his shoe.
I walk downstairs and turn right onto Fremont Street, or Glitter Gulch, as it’s known, the three blocks of casinos that constitute downtown Las Vegas. Unlike the Strip, whose pleasure palaces are surrounded by greasewood wastes that have to be navigated by car from oasis to oasis, Fremont Street can be managed on foot.
It is lined with the town’s older gambling establishments, opulent and faded like the Golden Nugget and the Mint, or just faded, like the Golden Gate and the Horseshoe Club. The street at night is a river of neon, swift and beautiful as it flows down the avenue. Current whines overhead, along with the pop, pop, pop of circuits switching on and off. Faces in the crowd turn red, white, and blue. Boys stop and stare open-mouthed. Girls titter. The air is charged. People are juiced on the sheer consumption of it, as if the turbines out at Hoover Dam can be heard throbbing thirty-five miles across the desert.
Examining casinos from Binion’s to the Union Plaza, I find them uniformly designed in concentric rings not unlike those Dante passed through at the hem of Virgil. One penetrates first into a dark forest of one-armed bandits patrolled by women wearing aprons full of money. Other women throw themselves into the metal arms of these machines, whose embrace is made friendly to humans by means of pictures—oranges, lemons, and church bells—that spin through windows on their faces. Blue-haired grand-mothers dip into Dixie cups of change to feed one, two, three machines at once in a frenzied parody of motherhood. Amid a great din of sirens and gongs and silver trickling down into metal bowls, one hears them coaxing, Thatta boy. You can do it. Let’s have another big one. Wheeeooo! Keep it coming.
The next smoky circle is reserved for the keno display, the Wheel of Fortune, electronic bridge games, the cashier’s cage, and parlors devoted to wagering on sports events. A scoreboard on the wall like those in airline terminals flashes track conditions at Bayview and news of a new filly running at Aqueduct.
The din lessens as the forest opens onto the main floor, which is chandeliered and plush, primary in color and instinct. At this point there is often a threshold to cross, a few steps marking the final descent. Arranged below in circles or squares or one great circle are the kidney-shaped tables reserved for twenty-one. Leaning over what look like giant caskets, men on another part of the floor shake dice and roar for their lucky numbers in the game of craps. A quieter group faces the roulette tables. They shuffle chips onto the layout, stare at the wheel, and sip long at their drinks as the ball orbits around its yet-to-be-chosen number. Farther to the rear in the posher casinos ivory dominoes click in the game of Pai Gow, and bankers and punters in evening dress take turns dealing baccarat cards to each other.
A crowd of spectators watches the big players finger their chips, while other onlookers—dealers, wheel spinners, and croupiers dressed in black bow ties and ruffled shirts—stare with corporate severity from the far side of the green felt barrier. The men in dark suits with thick faces and eye muscles turned to gristle are the pit bosses. Dead center among them, elevated at a little podium, stands the shift boss.
The Eye in the Sky, hidden behind one-way mirrors in the ceiling, constitutes another supervisorial level made up of video cameras and tape loops monitored at a central console. No gesture on the floor escapes the scrutiny of the Eye. The employees below play to it like marionettes. No dealer, croupier, or boss touches chips or money without then clapping his hands and turning them palm upward. No shuffle, cut, deal, roll, or spin is made without the Eye recording it. No player walks into a casino without the Eye remembering where and under what circumstances it last saw that face.
There is a gut rush, an unavoidable jag felt on descending to the main floor of a casino. Cocktail waitresses dressed as bunnies and harem girls teeter through the crowd. The air is charged with sexual cues and cultivated looks of availability. But the color, the spectacle, the precision and formality of it are directed elsewhere, toward pieces of silver, gold, paper, plastic, or whatever else is being used to represent money. A lot of money. Piles of bills with portraits of Madison and Grant on them. Mounds of chips numbered in $25, $100, $500 denominations. Money made liquid as it s
treams and eddies over the tables like the river of neon shooting down Fremont Street.
With half an hour to burn, I stroll through the Golden Gate, the Nugget, the Mint. I pass the flacks handing out coupons and cocktail waitresses hustling drinks; I stop in the crowd around the roulette wheels. Time and again I watch the ball drop and arc toward its rendezvous with one fortunate number.
Walking to the head of the street, I turn into the Sundance, a second-rate casino, a sawdust joint with the usual mix of slots and craps but less “action.” To find the really high rollers you have to look in the carpet joints out on the Strip. But the Sundance tonight has a cherry roulette wheel ripe for picking. The croupier keeps the rotor steady and spins a fast ball up on the track. The wheel should prove no match for computer sandwiches built into magic shoes.
I skirt the floor and walk to the back of the casino. From there I watch Doyne standing at one of the two wheels in play. Positioned at the head of the layout, he doodles in a notebook, looks now and again at the wheel, and then seems to screw up all his courage for the occasional bet on red or black. For a Ph.D. from the University of California, he looks distinctly goofy.
Doyne is passing tonight under the pseudonymous name of Clem from New Mexico. This is a role he first learned as a poker sharp touring the card rooms of Montana, and he plays it to perfection. He appears a half-wit, a mumbler, an innocent soul displaced from the prairie. No one around the table gives him the slightest thought. Roulette players like Clem divide into two general types: those of subnormal intelligence, and system players. Doyne could be either, or both. Las Vegas is crawling with gamblers trying to calculate a mathematical edge over one of its games. The casinos help them by providing pencils, scratchpads, runs of numbers, and diagrams of betting layouts and odds. Doyne standing next to the wheel doodling in his notebook looks like any other do-it-yourself mathematician trying to augur a pattern of numbers where none exists.