Science and Gambling

choi

Thomas A Bass, Humanity Hasn't Got a Chance; AI poker players can beat humans, computer models can predict horse races, and stock trades already move too fast for humans to keep up. Wall Street Journal, Mar 8, 2016
www.wsj.com/articles/humanity-hasnt-got-a-chance-1457396022
(book review on Adam Kucharski, The Perfect Bet; How science and math are taking the luck out of gambling. Basic Books, 2016)

Note:
(a) "The story begins 500 years ago, when Gerolamo Cardano leapt up from a card game in Venice to stab a cheating opponent. Wondering if there might be a less bloody defense against card sharps, Cardano began mathematically analyzing games of chance and working out the laws of probability. Thus commenced the long tradition of gamblers as godfathers to statistics, chaos theory, artificial intelligence and scientific systems for predicting the world financial markets."
(i) Gerolamo Cardano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano
(1501-1578; his first name is also spelled Girolamo or Geronimo)
(ii) Both Girolamo and Geronimo are Italian forms of Jerome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_%28given_name%29
(i) Gerolamo Cardano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerolamo_Cardano
(1501-1578; his first name is also spelled Girolamo or Geronimo)
(ii) Both Girolamo and Geronimo are Italian forms of Jerome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_%28given_name%29
(iii) sharp (n): "a real or self-proclaimed expert"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sharp

(b) "I should mention that I appear in Mr Kucharski's account. Featured in his narrative is the work of Eudaemonic Enterprises, a scientific commune in Santa Cruz, Calif, that built toe-operated computers into shoes and beat the game of roulette in the late 1970s. Proceeds from this venture went into a communal pot, known as the Eudaemonic Pie, which was the title of the 1985 book I wrote about my alternating roles as Eudaemonic scribe and high-stakes bettor. Mr Kucharski brings the story up to the present. He describes a successful computer-aided attack on London's Ritz casino, in 2004, and recent work by Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard and other Eudaemons on building models for market prediction.  Science and gambling are 'intertwined,' Mr Kucharski says * * * Mr Kucharski quotes a financial planner saying that gambling is 'the missing asset class' [in wealth management]"
(i) Eudaemons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
(a small group headed by graduate physics students J Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard at the University of California Santa Cruz in the late 1970s; The name of the group was inspired by the eudaimonism [qv] philosophy)
(ii) "built toe-operated computers into shoes"

A Eudaemonic Shoe.
www.thomasbass.com/the_eudaemonic_pie_1360.htm

It is "A" rather than "An," apparently (I am unaware of the pronunciation) because the "eu" in "Eudaemonic" is pronounced the same as that in "euphoric."  yet, National Interest had an article titled (correctly) "The Perils of an EU Army."
(iii) Thomas A Bass, The Eudaemonic Pie; The bizarre true story of how a band of physicists and computer wizards took on Las Vegas. Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

(c) "A US court ruled in 2012 that poker is a game of skill, which means that it does not count as gambling under federal law."

A federal district judge -- at United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (state), based in Brooklyn -- so ruled in 2012. United States v DiCristina, 886 F.Supp.2d 164 (EDNY 2012). United States appealed and United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (based in Manhattan) reversed (basically saying that whether poker is a game of skill or chance was irrelevant, but that the federal statute criminalizes "gambling BUSINESS" (emphasis added) ). Now the defendant, Mr DiCristina, petitioned to United States Supreme court to review the Second Circuit's interpretation of the federal law, but Supreme Court declined the petition (and therefore the second Circuit's decision stands).  

United States v DiCristina, 726 F.3d 92 (CA2 2013), certiorari denied _ US _ (2014).
http://law.justia.com/cases/fede ... 720-2013-08-06.html
has 23 pages and you will have to read up to page 12.