Following the summer campaign in Las Vegas, the Projectors took the earliest opportunity to head back to Nevada during Christmas vacation. They were still engaged in the process, as Doyne put it, of “exploring the envelope.”
For the Project’s Christmas trip, packed into the Blue Bus alongside the computers and roulette wheel were Doyne Farmer, ace data taker, Ingrid Hoermann, veteran player, and two people new to the Eudaemonic adventure—at least the traveling part of it. John Loomis was back to try out the solenoids he’d redesigned the previous spring for the Reno trip. Living in Project Artaud, an artists’ commune housed in an old factory on San Francisco Bay, Loomis was still supporting himself as a carpenter. “John worked long stints with breaks in between,” said Doyne, “which was just the right kind of schedule needed for doing the Project. He was a real trooper, and he turned out to be a good person to have along.” The fourth passenger riding the Blue Bus to Las Vegas was Neville Pauli, a former classmate of Letty’s from Stanford Law School who was being groomed as the Project’s high-stakes bettor.
On reaching Las Vegas on December 12, the Projectors followed their usual routine. They turned off the Strip into one of the seedier parts of town and started knocking on doors. They knew all the motels that catered to transients and gamblers, no questions asked, just pay in advance, first, last, and deposit. The trick in these joints was to front as little money as possible, because the Projectors were savvy by then to the fact that money in Las Vegas seldom makes its way back out through the cashier’s grill.
The troupe checked into a two-room suite at the Brooks Motel, a mom-and-pop operation just off the Strip on Paradise Road. They pulled the blinds and unpacked the computers and roulette wheel. Neville was jumpy. He was sure that outside on the deck next to the pool people could hear the roulette ball spinning on the track. It didn’t matter that it was December and that no one was outside. He insisted they keep the TV turned on to mask the sound. “We watched a lot of Sesame Street that trip,” said Ingrid.
After setting up the biofeedback machine, John worked on training himself as a data taker, while Neville and Ingrid practiced flipping chips onto the Project’s mock layout. “Neville developed a special costume for playing in the casinos,” said Doyne, “a kind of Kiwanis Club conference look with a blue blazer and short haircut. He looked very intense, like a rich dentist or something.”
Even though all the connectors had been newly insulated and the grounding system improved, the Projectors suffered their usual hardware problems with short circuits and loose wires. Fewer shocks came from the antenna T-shirts, but the players encountered a new problem caused by the winter temperatures. Moving in and out of casinos, passing from cool night air to overheated rooms, they found the frequencies on their radio receivers going off value. This problem with “thermal drift,” as Doyne called it, was complicated by the fact that the Bus had no heater. So they had to drive around town keeping the computers warm under sweaters placed on top of the engine cover.
Ingrid wore her rabbit fur coat and tried to look as seductive as she could with a computer and battery packs stuffed in her bra. Doyne wore knit pants with a polyester shirt and ski jacket. “John and I looked like your average hicks,” he said. Pauli fussed over getting the final touches right on his Kiwanis Club attire. Teamed up with Doyne for his first session at the Hilton Hotel, Neville in a few minutes cleared three hundred fifty dollars. When they rendezvoused later back on Paradise Road, Doyne was surprised to find him furious. There had been too many mix-ups with the signals, he said, while from Doyne’s perspective, there were no more than should be expected from an initial playing session.
Keeping their bets low, playing one- or two-dollar stakes, the Projectors inched the bank ahead seven or eight hundred dollars. They wanted a cushion under them before pushing the stakes. Even with their massive advantage over the house, they knew that statistical fluctuations could bury them deep in a hole before the law of large numbers arrived for the rescue. They tried to log three or four hours of play a day, and typical entries in the Black Book show average bets as low as sixty cents.
They favored a few casinos with good wheels: the Riviera, the Silverbird, and Caesars Palace. But after another big win at the Hilton, they ventured farther down the Strip to the MGM Grand—a barn of an establishment with a gaming room that looks like a converted supertanker. The wheels at the MGM were spinning fast, but they were also nicely tilted; so Doyne bought into a game, adjusted parameters on the computer, and signaled for Ingrid to start betting. Playing more than two hundred trials on the graveyard shift, Ingrid at the end of the session had lost four hundred forty dollars. “When I found out how badly we had done,” said Doyne, “it felt to me like statistical fluctuations. I thought conditions were good, and that’s why I’d hung in there so long.”
“The table was really crowded,” Ingrid remembered. “I couldn’t get a place near Doyne, and I kept losing his signal. We had decided to bet higher than normal stakes; so we were pushing money out faster than usual. I went through a hundred-dollar stack of chips, and then another and another and another. But it’s funny. Because I was losing, I wasn’t paranoid at all.
“The MGM has these underground corridors with spongy floors that run from the casino to the street, and we felt incredibly depressed walking out underground. It was worse in a place like this, where everyone was dressed up and slick. It had something to do with it being so anonymous, like a department store, except for the cocktail waitresses parading around in little costumes. It’s a middle-class fantasy with nothing to it. We walked out feeling like kids who had tried to play a prank and couldn’t pull it off. Surrounded by so much money and so many rich people, we couldn’t even begin to make a dent, and in the end they’d get us anyway.”
On returning to the motel Doyne and Ingrid found Neville in an agitated state. They were late. Why hadn’t they phoned? He thought they’d been roughed up and dumped in Lake Mead. Everyone was tired, strung out, discouraged. John had been planning to leave the following day, and Neville joined him on the plane to San Francisco. Doyne and Ingrid checked out of the Brooks and packed the wheel and computers into the Bus.
Doyne headed for the highway, but Ingrid insisted they stop downtown for one last look at the wheels. “We parked on a street behind the Fremont casinos,” she said. “Doyne was depressed after our session at the MGM. We sat on the grass in front of the Court House and stared at people revving their engines. Then we split up and walked through the casinos looking for one last wheel to play.
“When we found each other later, Doyne told me he’d spotted a good wheel at Sam Boyd’s California Club. This is a workingman’s casino, one of the smaller and sleazier of the downtown joints. It was Friday night and really crowded with people who had got off work to go gambling. There were only two wheels in play, far back in the club. Doyne set his parameters and gave me the signal to buy into the game. I went into the bathroom and turned on the equipment.”
“There were a lot of funny people in there that night,” said Doyne, “old ladies and sheepherders, a guy playing with his daughter, and a German immigrant. The German invited Ingrid over to his house for Christmas dinner, while I struck up a conversation with the pit boss, who was a twenty-eight-year-old blonde. ‘How do you like being a pit boss?’ I asked. ‘How’s life in Las Vegas?’ It was weird and a bit distracting, because I felt as if I could have asked her out for a date. Ingrid and I played for three hours, and it must have been one of the most relaxed sessions we ever had.
“Our bank kept going up and down, up and down, but it went up steadily between all the downs. As we sat there, I watched three-hundred-dollar swings in either direction. It was one of those frustrating sessions where the ball keeps falling just to the right or left of the predicted cups. Or you bet on numbers thirty and nine, and the ball lands on number twenty-six, the pocket between them. We’d raise stakes and lose, and then lower them and win. All in all, I didn’t think we were doing very well. But I
make a point when I’m data taker of not paying too much attention to the bettor and how many chips she has. It’s irrelevant how much money she’s making. I’m only worried whether the ball lands where the computer predicts it will.”
“I actually happened to be winning a lot of money,” said Ingrid, “and I didn’t know whether I should act surprised. It was so consistent that it seemed hard to get excited about, especially since I knew I was going to keep winning. If I screamed or giggled or clapped, what was I going to do the next time the computer won, or the time after that? This could get real old after three hours, and I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. But the guy who had invited me to dinner was watching me and getting excited and exclaiming, ‘God, you won again!’
“‘Some days you win,’ I’d say, trying to act casual, ‘and some days you don’t.’
“I was tired and spaced out after a couple of hours of playing, and I missed parts of the betting pattern that often held the winning number. But by that point we were making so much money I didn’t get upset about it. Things were going so well that I just kept raising the stakes. By hiding my five-dollar chips under lesser denominations, not even the croupier knew how much we were winning until the end, when I scooped up all my chips and cashed out.”
On meeting Doyne later at the Blue Bus, Ingrid reported clearing more than a thousand dollars. “It was a psychological shot in the arm,” said Doyne. “The Project might have been dead without it. The money didn’t matter so much as the fact that the computer had done exactly what it was supposed to do. I would have jumped up and down with joy, if I hadn’t been so exhausted.”
11
Small Is Beautiful
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly
Within the space of thirteen months, the Project had made no fewer than eight forays into Nevada. Beginning with Doyne and Alix’s shadowboxing at South Lake Tahoe and Reno in December 1977, there had followed in quick succession the New Year’s trip to Las Vegas, with Doyne’s first “big” win at the Golden Gate Casino, the spring training session at Ralph’s “cabin,” the three summer waves to Las Vegas, the recent Christmas trip, and a January 1979 junket to Reno made by Norman, Jim Crutchfield, and Jack Biles. Clearing several thousand dollars in profit while betting mainly dimes and quarters, they had proved the system worked. But the Project, if it was going to continue, needed to upgrade itself from bush to major league. The Eudaemons needed a higher rate of return on their investment of time and money, which called for a larger pool of betting capital, more reliable equipment, and better training. “In the gambling business,” said Ralph Abraham, “either you’re a professional or you’re nothing.”
“We had been bootstrapping the bank up from zero dollars,” said Doyne, “by betting only what we made in ‘profit.’ This was a good conservative strategy to follow while we were testing the system, but we were overly cautious. We should have switched gears and pushed the stakes harder a lot earlier. It’s easy to go into a casino and get nervous and play smaller stakes, because you figure that way you can’t hurt anything, or get hurt. But you’re not taking into account what this does to you psychologically. Over the long haul it wears you down. Playing dimes and winning fifty dollars with the computer, you know in principle you’ve done something great. But it’s not nearly as impressive as playing ten-dollar chips and winning five thousand dollars.”
The Projectors had been plagued for a year by hardware problems—loose wires, bad connections, shocks, clamping solenoids, drifting signals. If they were going to transform themselves into professional gamblers, they could no longer tolerate having wires draped all over their bodies. Out to the scrap heap would go the first generation of Eudaemonic computers, along with the sacroiliac belts, solenoid plates, antenna T-shirts, and computer bras. The Project at this advanced stage required a new generation of computers—more compact, reliable, and efficient, with greater integration and fewer chips. “If you can get your chip count down to one,” said Ingerson, “then you’ve solved the problem, at least internally, of bad connections.” The name of the game for Eudaemonic Enterprises, and everyone else in the computer business, was miniaturization. “Small is beautiful” had become the clarion call for both micro- and macroeconomics.
They thought it might take six months to build a new generation of equipment. But as Doyne and the Chaos Cabal got deeper into the mysteries of strange attraction, they found themselves with less and less time for the Project. Having already spent a year and a half out of school building roulette computers, Doyne was now back at the university with papers to publish and classes to teach. To “professionalize” the equipment would require another large dose of time and talent. The computer needed to be redesigned, reprogrammed, and rebuilt from the ground up. Who would be crazy enough to tackle an assignment like this? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could put on your résumé, and Eudaemonic Enterprises didn’t have much to offer by way of cash incentives. A slice of Eudaemonic Pie delivered at some unknown future date sounded appetizing enough, but anyone smart enough to build a roulette computer could go to work at Intel with a starting salary of $35,000 a year, not to mention stock options and other sweeteners. The Project was on the verge of expiring after a few tantalizing successes. Its only hope of surviving lay in the unlikely event that it fell into the hands of a hacker possessed of knowledge in computers, electronics, physics, mathematics, and information theory. Furthermore, this hacker would need to be unemployed, close-mouthed, good with his hands, and free to work nights, weekends, vacations, and every moment in between. In exchange for signing on with Eudaemonic Enterprises, said hacker would receive a minimum wage, paid irregularly, and a slice of Eudaemonic Pie. There might be only one place in the world where an advertisement such as this would stand a chance of netting even a single applicant. Along the mountainous fringes of the Silicon Valley, the Project put out word through the grapevine: they were looking for a hacker extraordinaire.
“I had the naive vision when we started the Project,” said Doyne, “that we were all embarking on the same enterprise. We were going to be partners. We were going to take it seriously. We were going to stick to it until it was done. And because I thought we were all in it together, there were times I resented being the one who had to go out on a limb. I didn’t imagine I’d be a more significant participant than other people, but I ended up doing a huge share of the work by myself. I guess I really wanted something like the Project to happen. I viewed it as my chance to break out of the pack, and when I get determined to do something, I don’t give up very easily. But at this stage, unless someone else took the initiative, the race wasn’t going to get run.”
As they thought of ways to save the Project, one idea kept reappearing as the perfect solution. In order to get all the hardware off their bodies, what if Eudaemonic Enterprises, as if by magic, could compress their computer, batteries, antennas, and solenoids into a shoe, or, at most, two shoes? Was it possible to make an ambulatory computer? Could one really fit the circuitry of a computer and all of its peripheral devices into a shoe? The answer to these questions lay in a feat of miniaturization not even attempted by the Japanese. Eudaemonic Enterprises had already made breakthroughs in the physics of roulette—by solving the equations of motion that govern the game—but their next challenge lay in building a computer small enough to operate out of a shoe.
“We were convinced the Project was going to work,” said Norman, “but by the end of the January trip, we realized we had to have greater reliability, because unreliability was killing us. And to make the Project work, we needed to put the computer in a shoe, which was going to be expensive. We guessed it would take five thousand dollars to rebuild the system to that scale. I had no money. I was deep in the red for my college education, and there were times I had to borrow money from Doyne or Letty just to pay my share of the household expenses. In retrospect, it seems crazy to me that I would go off on this hare-brained
scheme when I was completely in debt. Obviously, the pie-in-the-sky aspects of it led us on. We were youthful. We persevered. The Project had been scraping by up to that point on Doyne’s money. But he’d reached the bottom of the barrel. We needed an outside investor, or the computer would never make it into a shoe. That’s when Letty stepped forward to say she’d finance the new hardware and provide enough betting capital for us to push the stakes in Las Vegas. She’d been lending money to Doyne along the way, but this was her first official involvement in financing the Project per se.”
In preparation for building the computer in a shoe, Doyne asked Jonathan Kanter to redesign the radio system by which the data taker and bettor communicated with each other. Having un-braided his dreadlocks and backed off from the more overt manifestations of Rastafarianism, Kanter was supporting himself by commuting to the Silicon Valley to sell ideas. On one successful trip over the hill he had sold an idea to a video editing company, and this in turn kept him commuting back in their direction to sell more ideas.
The radio link had been the Achilles’ heel of the Project from the beginning. It was always on the fritz, flaking out, suffering from thermal drift, or being overrun by noise. Magnetic induction had proved undetectable by the casinos, but it was also at times undetectable by the players themselves. Kanter’s assignment was to get the transmitters blasting out a clean, no-nonsense signal.
“You can think of them as a magnetic field wiggling around,” Norman said of the transmitters and receivers. “You put a loop of wire in the field and that produces a voltage, which has to be amplified in order to turn it into a signal that the computer can detect. I knew how to do this. But the engineering involved in implementing these ideas is a nontrivial task. We had already changed the design two or three times, and when Jonathan suggested an alternate design, we decided to go with it.
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 21
