“The data looked positive at the time. But I had queasy feelings about them, and my feelings had gotten queasier that spring when I went to campus and modified the programs for the post-Newtonian method. I realized that our data base wasn’t big enough. I had the feeling we were fudging too many things. None of the methods seemed to work better than any other, which made me suspicious.
“So I wrote a special program that translated the hexadecimal floating-point binary arithmetic of the KIM—that’s base sixteen with binary, or base two, exponents—into numbers that were readable by the campus computer. I transcribed the times from one computer onto the other and had them displayed in series, which I then compared to the times recorded by Norman’s clock.”
Doyne discovered a number of surprising things, including the fact that he had occasionally messed up his calculations by spinning the roulette ball in the wrong direction. But this alone didn’t explain the problem, and he set to work ferreting other bugs out of the KIM’s program.
“I thought we had made successful histograms as early as May or April, although I later realized these were statistical fluctuations. They were poltergeists. False starts leading nowhere. Several times I thought I had all the bugs shaken out, but the program still didn’t work. So I’d go up to campus, run the program through, check it point by point, locate a couple of mistakes, and go home to make more histograms with the KIM and roulette wheel. I finally found a mistake in the last stage of the program, where it actually computes the answer. After I cleaned out the garbage, I was in utter despair when the program still didn’t work.”
At that point Doyne had no choice but to go back to the beginning of the Project and start all over again. He attached the photocells to Norman’s electronic clock, set them up on the wheel, and began duplicating the data gathered the previous summer. Except that this time, alongside the clock, he ran the KIM, which allowed him to double-check whether clock and computer were synchronized.
Doyne soon discovered the cause for his summer’s grief in debugging the program. “Norman’s clock was out to lunch. It was messing up the original data all the way through. Probably due to hardware problems, the clock was making errors in recording the times. But these were exactly the kind of errors you could easily miss, because they were never very large. They averaged five hundredths of a second, which is just enough to simulate human error all the way along.”
After dumping out the wrong and putting in the right times, the predictions on the KIM and the university computer “agreed every step of the way. I rushed home to tell Norman about it and we sat down at the wheel. I motored around the mode map, set the parameters, and clicked into the play mode.”
To make way for a piano, the Project had been shuffled by then into a small chamber behind the kitchen. The room was crammed with the roulette wheel on its picnic table, shelves full of components, an oscilloscope, Raymond, the KIM, and the biofeedback machine. “Norman and I were really packed in there along with the roulette wheel and all this other stuff. The KIM and Raymond were balanced around the wheel, with wires running everywhere.
“To get all the data recorded at once and the wheel spinning at a reasonable speed takes some work. Norman and I sat down and got cranking. We were working as fast as we could, spinning the wheel and writing down data and graphing the outcome. We weren’t even stopping to look at the histogram.
“We must have logged eighty runs. We were locked into the middle of this thing, until, finally, I turned to Norman and said, ‘Let’s take a look.’ We held up the histogram, and there was a band of data points running straight up the center of it. The computer was doing just what it was supposed to do. We got really excited. We jumped up and down and hugged each other. This was our big breakthrough. A year and a summer after starting the Project, we finally had concrete proof that we could beat roulette.”
A strawberry blonde with an impish smile and a flair for androgyny, Marianne Walpert presided over the Eudaemonic Halloween party that fall as Dionysius incarnate. Sheathed in a white robe and garlanded with a crown of laurel leaves, she walked among the guests serving laughing gas out of a plastic garbage bag. She had brewed her concoction in the Project Room, after having turned it for the night into a chemistry laboratory complete with Bunsen burners, Erlenmeyer flasks, pipettes, and other equipment needed for slow boiling and filtering the night’s refreshment.
As a physics major at the university, Marianne breezed through her courses on curiosity alone. An argonaut into uncharted realms, psychic and physical, she also knew how to make friends and put people at ease. Ralph Abraham began frequenting the Riverside house after Marianne moved in, and another friend of hers, Alix Youmans, figures for an incandescent moment in the history of Eudaemonia.
Doyne had been Marianne’s teaching assistant in Physics 6A, the basic course for first-year students. “He was very mysterious around school,” she said, “and it was only a couple of years later, when he invited me over to dinner to see if I wanted to move into the house, that he took me into his room and explained what was going on. It had been such a deep secret that I didn’t know what to expect.
“When I saw the roulette wheel and a roomful of electronic equipment, with chips and wires covering everything, I was totally amazed. I couldn’t believe it. We talked about the Project for hours. I wanted to know how it worked and what they had figured out, because I was skeptical. I mean no one wins at roulette. But it seemed like a great idea to rip off casinos who get so much pleasure out of ripping off everyone else. I thought it was wonderful, and I couldn’t wait to get involved.”
After moving into the Riverside house, Marianne took off on an African trek. She flew to Paris, hitchhiked to Marseille, caught a boat for North Africa, and traveled overland across the Sahara from Tunisia to Cameroon. Having met Dan Browne only once before in Santa Cruz, she had convinced him to join her for the last leg of the trip. Flush with poker winnings, he was game for the adventure. Driving in a truck caravan, with one truck full of spare parts and others full of gasoline and water, it took them a month to cross the Sahara.
At the end of the summer, Marianne returned to Santa Cruz with a new friend whom she had met on the airplane, Alix Youmans, a thirty-year-old Parisienne in the midst of getting divorced from a wealthy husband in San Diego. Elegant and smart, she was versed in hiding her brains behind a patina of talk about astrology, est, and other psychic fads. Doyne imagined that Alix, with her French accent and wardrobe, could play perfectly the role of rich socialite accustomed to winning and losing large sums at roulette.
Alix began by lending herself to the Project’s electroshock experiments in which current, run through electrodes and conductive cream, flowed indiscriminately over her body at levels often painfully high. This method of outputting data from the computer was later abandoned when Jonathan Kanter suggested they switch to a tamer form of mechanical output from solenoids. A solenoid is a little thumper that can be fine-tuned to vibrate against the skin at different frequencies. Activated by a magnetic field, it consists of a metal plunger that bobs up and down in a cylindrical coil of copper wire. Three solenoids, placed on adjacent parts of the body and vibrated at varying speeds, could transmit the nine signals needed to predict the outcome in roulette.
For the new solenoid system, the Projectors built three little thumpers into a metal plate, which was fastened under a belt and worn tight on the stomach. Translating local perturbations over the duodenum into a betting strategy took some practice, but otherwise the only problem with the solenoids lay in finding a way to hold their metal plungers in place. They bounced around like Mexican jumping beans, and would have flown around the room without something either tying them down or covering them.
“We experimented with Saran Wrap and Band-Aids,” said Doyne, “but the Saran Wrap punctured too easily and the Band-Aids gummed up. We needed something sensitive yet tough enough to withstand these repeated vibrations. We finally discovered the perfect solution: condoms held in place wi
th radiator clamps. We made the early trips to Nevada with a large supply of rubbers and clamps.”
In preparation for a trip to the casinos by December, Norman, Marianne, Doyne, and Alix got swept up in a flurry of hardware building. They manufactured the transmitters, receivers, and antennas needed for a radio link between data taker and bettor. They developed wardrobes and disguises and a coded language for emergencies, in which computers were called brains, batteries energy, and wires nerves. A remark about alpha waves meant that the brain was up and running, while My nerves are shot! referred to broken wires or a short circuit in the system.
On the afternoon of December 7, 1977, Doyne and Alix loaded Raymond and Harry, along with the transmitters, receivers, and toe-operated microswitches, into the Blue Bus. Doyne drove into the Sierra Nevada on Interstate 80, his destination being the casinos just across the Nevada line. Caught in a heavy snowstorm without tire chains, he and Alix barely made it over Donner Pass and down to South Lake Tahoe late that night.
In a laboratory notebook—the kind with black and white marbled covers and cloth tape binding—they recorded the trip’s significant events in two columns. Marked “Left Page” and “Right Page,” these columns were supposed to correspond in function to the two hemispheres of the cerebrum. The left page was subtitled “Journal (Life of a Gambler),” while the right page was reserved for “Technical Events.”
The Journal for the first day records how Doyne and Alix slept in the Bus and woke late the following morning. “Not too cold, but damp,” it said, before noting to “fix heater in the Bus, get a complete set of window curtains, fix window, fix leaks in roof.”
The Technical Events are equally dour. They begin, “Electrical outlets in gas stations are very handy for soldering loose wires,” and go on to record a chronology in which Doyne spent the entire day driving from one gas station to another fixing loose connections.
Alix, in the meantime, began another journal, this one in a black three-ring notebook. It recorded for each casino in Tahoe—and later for most of the casinos in Reno and Las Vegas—the layout of their roulette wheels, the tilt of the wheels, the names of croupiers, and various notes on shift changes and other pertinent data. The notebook also held financial records for each casino. These recorded the size of the bank used for betting, dates of play, numbers of trials, and money either won or lost.
With their radio link not yet debugged, Doyne decided to give up on the two-person system and play solo as both data taker and bettor. Under a loose-fitting sweater, he wired himself from head to foot with the computer under one armpit, battery packs under the other, the solenoid plate on his stomach, and toe switches down in his shoes. Needing ample room for the switches, he had built them into the kind of high-heeled footwear favored by pimps on Eighth Avenue. The shoes were treacherous for walking in snow, of which there was plenty that winter in Tahoe.
Doyne began by buying into a game at the Cal-Neva Club. He had finished setting parameters on the computer and was ready to play when a number of electric shocks, caused by short circuits in the wiring, forced him into the toilet. “I had a lot of problems with getting shocked. I would start sweating, and the sweat would cause short circuits, which would make me sweat even more. So on several occasions I wanted to rip off my sweater and throw it away.”
With too much snow in the parking lots for Doyne to navigate in his “pimp shoes,” and too little action in the casinos, he and Alix drove that evening to Reno. They parked on the edge of town and fell asleep in the Bus. Late the next day, Doyne wired himself into the computer. Walking into Harrah’s, the poshest casino in town, he played another solo session while Alix collected data on roulette wheels—until the Project met with a near disaster.
Doyne had bought into the game and finished driving around the mode map when short circuits forced him away from the table. It was too cold to work outside at gas station outlets; so he carried with him in a book bag a few rudimentary tools for fixing the computer.
“I locked myself in a nice, cozy toilet down in the basement of Harrah’s. The computer was open on my lap, along with an ohmmeter I was using to check voltages along the lines. It’s hard to fix a computer with nothing but an ohmmeter. It’s like trying to rebuild the engine in your car with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I had a pocket full of extra chips and was just about to insert one into the computer when a security guard poked his head over the toilet stall. He was a young guy about my age with a mustache.
“‘Hey, what are you doing down there?’ he yelled.
“I’m fixing my radio,’ I said, as I stuffed the computer in my book bag.
“‘Do you always fix your radio in the john?’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘but it’s cold outside.’
“I made up a story about being a tourist on vacation, something harmless, like a literature graduate student. He asked for my driver’s license and wrote down my name and number on a piece of paper.
“When he finished writing, he turned to me and said. ‘Look, all I have to say is, don’t fix your radio in the bathroom anymore, because it’s not a good place to do it. A lot of times drunks come in here and pass out, and we have to check up on them. I just thought you might have been sleeping in there.’ I’m sure the piece of paper with my name on it ended up in the wastebasket, but the experience really shook me up.”
After their close call at Harrah’s, Doyne and Alix the following day tried to play roulette at other casinos. But much of their time was devoted to troubleshooting the computer, with Doyne plugging in the soldering iron and working on the sidewalk at one of the half dozen gas stations in Reno with outdoor electrical outlets.
“Harry went bye-bye early in the trip, and Raymond never settled into serious play. The trip was one long technological failure. It was basically shadow boxing, with only two or three hours spent actually playing, but it helped me get the feel of the casinos, and I spent a lot of time talking to croupiers.”
Traveling back across the mountains that night, Doyne and Alix reached Sacramento by three in the morning. At dawn Alix caught a plane for San Diego. Exhausted, Doyne pulled off the road and slept for an hour before driving back to Santa Cruz alone.
Letty flew up from Los Angeles to spend Christmas in Santa Cruz, and then she, Doyne, and Dan Browne packed themselves into the Blue Bus for the Project’s first trip to Las Vegas. Arriving by Greyhound from Silver City, Norman would meet them in Glitter Gulch. After the Reno trip, Doyne had worked nonstop on fine-tuning the system, and the Project was ready, he thought, for an assault on the world’s gambling mecca.
Leaving Santa Cruz on New Year’s Eve, they drove south to Paso Robles before swinging east to Bakersfield and the Sierra Nevada. “On a moonlit night with mist rising in the valleys, it was a beautiful trip,” said Doyne. “Letty drove and I slept until Barstow, where we hit Route 15 and the main blast into Nevada. There was a steady stream of cars pouring out of Las Vegas on their way back to Los Angeles. For a hundred miles in front of us there was a ribbon of headlights coming over the hills, while off on the horizon at the end of the lights was an orange glow. You knew you were going somewhere, that something big was sitting out there in the desert.”
Arriving at four in the morning on New Year’s Day, they camped on a hill overlooking the lights of Las Vegas. Dan Browne woke later that morning to find a volleyball in the middle of the desert. Everyone considered it a good omen.
Las Vegas in the daylight is flattened and splayed on the horizon. Without the nighttime tunnels of light leading into it, the city no longer has any obvious entrance or center. It straggles over the prairie after which it was named (las vegas being Spanish for “the meadows”) in a net of streets and buildings that look in winter as brown as the scurf of desert on which they sit.
They drove to the southern edge of town and found the neighborhood bordering the University of Nevada. Tom Ingerson, visiting his sister and brother-in-law for the holiday, had been promised a roulette demonstration. Doyne unp
acked the wheel from the back of the Bus and set it up in the Zanes’ living room. He resoldered a few wires, adjusted the condoms on his solenoids, and pronounced everything ready for the demonstration.
“Of course it messed up,” he said. “It didn’t work. I had come by that time to expect that whenever I tried to do a demonstration for someone, the computer would go on the blink. According to Murphy’s law, demonstrations are more prone to equipment failure than playing sessions, because you’re going to be embarrassed.”
Over the next few days Doyne got enough equipment running to play a solo session at the Golden Gate Casino on Fremont Street. By that time all the other Projectors except Dan Browne had left town, and the only computer working reliably was Raymond. Without a radio link, Doyne would again risk playing both data taker and bettor. One of the more cramped and disheveled of the downtown casinos, the Golden Gate caters to a clientele of truckers hunkered over the craps layouts and Sun City snowbirds catnapping in front of the keno board. Roulette is no big draw, and the casino’s two tattered layouts are shoved hard against the wall. Limiting himself to betting dimes, Doyne hoped his incursion into enemy territory would do only statistical damage.
Wired with Raymond the computer, the batteries, solenoid plate, and toe clickers, Doyne walked into the Golden Gate for a try at beating his first Las Vegas wheel. Dan Browne stood near him at the table. Pretending to play roulette, Browne was actually compiling a success histogram for the computer’s predictions. Working backwards from Doyne’s bets to compare predicted and actual outcomes in the game, he would duck behind the slot machines every few minutes to record data.
“This was my first real session playing solo,” Doyne said. “I wanted to lock into a wheel and compile enough statistics to prove we had an advantage. I was very nervous about the croupiers being suspicious of me. But I was intent on winning and showing that the computer worked. I was playing dimes, and I thought with stakes like that they couldn’t get too upset with me.”
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 12
