Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Can Isaac Newton Help you Predict the Roulette Wheel?

Life would be far simpler if you could stroll into the casino with a computer hidden across your chest.

Imagine the edge that solenoid electromagnets thumping against your body - telling you where to place your bet on the roulette table – would give you. However, the electric shock risk is a bit of an issue here, casino staff’s suspensions may be aroused when you rush to the toilet to undertake emergency repairs, change the battery or administer first aid.

Luckily you have the help of Casinopedia’s online casino reviews and helpful guides, giving you easy access to everything you need to know about the roulette game. But can you really predict where the ball will land?

Back in the late 1970s, some US students constructed a purpose-built computer to do exactly that and predict where a roulette ball would land. However, there was one small flaw in their plan, it was bollocks.

The team never found a reliable way of doing it, which leaves us posing the question, can Isaac Newton really help you predict the Roulette Wheel?

Before you stop reading, thinking we're about to go all Brian Cox on you, bear with us. To get to the bottom if this, we need to delve - a little bit - into the somewhat dry topic of mechanisms and physics.

Whether you’re new to playing casino games or an experienced player, let’s take a look at the principles of the game of roulette.

A croupier spins a wheel in one direction and a ball in the opposing direction, punters then bet on where they think the ball will land. Thankfully, I am no Brian Cox, yet my understanding of the physics behind roulette is first class. The movement of the ball and wheel is pretty solid, governed by Newton’s laws of motion.

In non-boffin terms, the ball slows, gravity takes hold and it falls into one of the compartments with a number assigned to it.

It is predictable when the ball will leave the rim. However, once it does, the route it takes to a numbered slot is not so predictable. The reason behind this is that the ball may strike obstacles making it difficult to predict its bounce.

Sticking with Newtonian physics, remember that the variables around each roulette wheel are slightly different.

Take the atmospheric conditions, they are continually changing and the wheel itself has been built to favour randomness - they don’t want you to know this bit, but the size of the frets between the numbers, and the diamond-shaped obstacles that intercept the ball as it falls down to the wheel, are not all the same.

In short, you cannot predict the exact number where the ball will land. But we're not giving up that easily, you only need to know which area of the wheel the ball will land and you can gain a massive advantage over the casino.

To use this information to our advantage we need to bring in a computer, which would allow punters to adjust parameters for each wheel before a game. This would help determine the rate at which the ball and wheel slowed, as well as the ball’s velocity when it fell. We would also need to establish if there was any wheel tilt.

During play a punter would need to give a signal to the computer each time a certain point on the wheel passed by, and also when the ball passed by. By doing this we would have provided the computer with the information needed for a program to calculate the speed of both the wheel and the ball – thus knowing when the ball would start to fall.

While we still can’t predict exactly where the ball will fall, we are able to work out the relative positions of the ball and make a prediction about where the ball will finally land. The computer then transmits the prediction to the person wearing the second computer and hay presto, punter 1 casino 0.

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