Gain Access The Eudaemonic Pie Outlined By Thomas A. Bass In Manuscript

topic, tedious writing style,

I do think these types of histories are valuable, as it's important to remember that the history of silicon valley was not written entirely in ragstoriches tales, but consisted of many such bands of struggling Quixotic youth.


He also gets points for the obvious enjoyment he derives from the rebellious counterculture, It seems like so many programmers nowadays are so annoyingly "normal," we forget that the people who invented all this stuff were often outside the boundaries of the straight and narrow.


But given that it's a story more about the journey than the goal, the journey, as portrayed, is awfully monotonous.


The pace does pick up some about two thirds of the way through: the first part consists of a mindnumbingly encyclopedaic enumeration of various people involved, evidently from interviews.
Gradually, it morphs to a firsthand narrative, I feel like he could have either left out a hundred pages or so, or connected the dots better so we would feel more engaged with the events and characters.


I personally found interest in it because I live in Santa Cruz and went to UCSC at about the same time as those described in the book, and worked with many of the same technologies wirewrap, the.
The ideas he presents that it was outrageous at the time to think of beating roulette are mildly interesting.


I get the feeling that he is a bit too overawed by the ideas he's discussing to convey them effectively.


I had a blast reading this, By nature, I find myself biased because the author was also a professor of mine in college and someone I have grown to have a great respect for.

Bass, however, captured a moment in time when computers were a vision of the future and not what they are today, an expected commodity.
He follows a band of physics junkies who map out a way to beat roulette with microcomputers and even finds himself getting involved.

Bass is a brilliant bastard by most means and has a unique perspective on the world, something I was fortunate enough to have experienced in the classroom as well as in his writing.
This book had a super interesting story to tell, Unfortunately it toldstories in great detail, It's been a great story about building a computer to predict the roulette in casinos, A few physicists came up with the idea and the algorithm to do it ingenious! I'm amazed for how long these dozens of people have participated in this complicated project.
It's sad that there was no financial gain

from it at the end because of the constant issues with the unreliable hardware/software.
If they'd had access to today's DIY computer technologies, the computers would've been much more reliable and smaller,
A substory here is the "Eudaemonic Enterprises", a company that united all those different people working on the project at one place and where the house was run communally.
The vignettes of life in Santa Cruz in the roughly two decades preceding my arrival including UCSC, Boardwalk, Riverside Avenue, San Lorenzo River are what kept me hanging on, but it was really a slog with and the endless descriptions of testing and refining the parameters and practically every other paragraph mentioning "buzzing solenoids," silicone sandwiches, binary code, and a handful of other technological terms over and over.


The premise was exciting and apparently many others thought so as well, More and more people joined the project with every chapter and it becomes increasingly clear, with so many people involved in the project, it couldn't possibly be a viable form of income whether it technically works is a whole other story.
By the time the author, introduced in Chapter, finally joins in the overall timeline not just recounting everyone else's experience in a flashback of Chapter's events, we are overpages in.


Still, it was exciting to read about the feeling of connectedness and community and the fun times they had, like when I was just three years old, they parted like it wasthe year after I graduated from UCSC.
Go Slugs! I think a lot of my evaluation of this book hinges on what happens in the end, because basically what I was presented with throughout the whole thing was a series of naive, utopian dreamers looking to accomplish something improbable.
Those are a dimeadozen, so it's only a surprise when they actually succeed, In the end, things just sort of peter out, and apparently the publication of this book burned that bridge for anyone else who really wanted to try, since it somehow spurred Nevada into passing a nocomputersinthecasino law.


Normally I wouldn't care whether or not these guys succeeded, but so much of the narrative is actually wrapped up in these guys being underappreciated geniuses taking on a seemingly impossible task.
I think the book does not really seem to incorporate the lesson of their failure into the narrative appropriately.
The fact that this is basically Wiredquality writing read: popular science/technology basically always wrong littered with scientific misapprehensions just adds to the burden of providing something satisfying.


One thing that's nice to know, though, is that these Wired writers who are always breathlessly writing about the next big entrepreneur don't seem to change their tune even when that entrepreneur fails.
It's not just that they're terrible at predicting the future, they're also bad at analyzing the past,

.ofstars I am now addicted to gambling, . . books. All daemons create chaos

This book is not a technical manual, It does not provide the differential equations which govern roulette, much less provide the algorithms for computer code to solve these simultaneous equations and predict the outcome of a roulette game.
Does the author know these things Maybe, but that would make a much less interesting story,
This is the story of a group of brilliant and odd characters who discover the limitations chaos imposes on logic, reason, and community.
Their goal was to create a utopian society funded by profits from gambling, Well, that's life. What if a handful of physics and engineering brains decided they wanted to win in Las Vegas If the game was roulette and the era was thes, the story would be just whats recounted here.
To answer the obvious question: the brains succeeded, but it took them a few years, For a decent summary of the book, see sitelinkthis NYTBR review from,

A note of craziness I recall: In researching previous efforts to systematize gambling, they found that Salvador Dalí had developed a poker method that would exactly break even.
Possibly my memory is wrongit may not have been poker or Dalíbut someone had devised a precisely pointless approach that neither won nor lost.
Details like that added to the fun of this whizkidsonamission tale,

There's another crazy note to this story, and I don't recall whether the book reports this one: What the Eudaemonians decided to do had already been done! In the earlys, mathematicians Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon the latter is known to many for his work in information theory devised what's often regarded now as the first wearable computer, which was built into a shoe and intended to aid in winning at roulette.
As I don't know where the book has gotten to, I can't check the index to see whether Thorp and Shannon's work is included.
I learned of it from the March/Aprilissue of MIT Technology , which contains sitelinkan unofficial review of today's bestknown wearable computer, Google Glass.
But sitelinka paper by Thorp reveals that a future member of the Eudaemonians had contacted him "around" to discuss the ThorpShannon project.


Why do the same thing again,or so years later As a merely technical matter, it's not hard to imagine an answer: improved hardware.
I love this book. It tells the story of a hippiephysicist commune's attempt, at the dawn of the microcomputer age, to build computers in shoes in order to beat roulette.
And the author was one of them, so this is no outsider's perspective on what happened,

So what were they up to The same thing countless people are up to trying to figure out how to pursue their dreams.
In this case, the dream was to be physicists and technologists who were completely independent of the militaryindustrial complex, free to pursue whatever avenues of study, travel, electronics project, or social contribution they desired.


The two founders of the venture both got into gambling, and being driven intellectuals, they were system players playing methodically for statistically maximal profit.
Eventually they realized that the seemingly random game of roulette was actually the ideal target for them as physicists and mathematicians to beat the system.


They soon worked out that it was, indeed, theoretically possible to predict with enough accuracy where the ball would land, to make money on roulette.


And so began Eudaemonic Enterprises, the capitalist frontend to the hippiephysicist intentional community, From, they gathered data, solved equations, wrote software, and tried to build shoes with computers in the soles, computers that could talk to each other and communicate with the wearer and tell them what number to bet on.


In the end, the technology of the day wasn't up to the task, but they did realize their biggest dream: to live according to Aristotle's eudaemonia, the state of felicity obtained by a life lived in accordance to reason.
I bought two copies of Bass' book upon seeing Martin Gardner's review: One for me, and one for my engineering mentor who, a few years earlier, had proposed the same thesis the protagonists knew: Once the croupier has released the ball, the outcome is deterministic.
The story is technically accurate: The purposebuilt wearable computer, using the same brain as our Apple computer version, plus a marvelously surreptitious interface, would make Maxwell Smart proud.
As an early view into personal computer era homebrew development teams, it is also realistic, And though we never "fielded" our solution, the vicarious experience of trial, retrial, and intheater operation through Bass' coverage was wonderful, compelling, and thrilling.
And satisfyingly, ultimately redeemed those "wasted" hours,



well, nearly
of course I would say that, This appears to be a book about trying to beat casinos, but it is really an anecdotal slice of history starring a group of physicists who learned to love that new gadget the microcomputer.
It brings California, young Silicon Valley, and the post hippie era together into a narrative about people that were trying to shape the world in their own way.
Probably one of the best layman book on a technical subject I've read, perhaps ever, The text follows the exploits of the Eudaemons, a group of hackers and physicist assembled by Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard of Hewlett Packard relations in the mids to build mini computers they could predict Roulette wheel end states.


These machines were ingenious for the time and effectively simulated Roulette as a physical system to produce its output.
This was the key insight of Farmer, who took the work of Thrope and Shannon, who did statistical/mathematical modeling of Roulette, and saw that modeling the wheel as a physical system was not only possible with the technology of the time building the model functions by architecting the circuit topology and soldering it together , but the predictive performance of these devices were superior to the statistical approach.


Dowyne also lucked out that contemporaneous to his venture, Wozniak and Jobs were implanting highlevel languages to build functionality for their Mac, and this started the digital computing craze of thes ands.
Dowyne would go on to take these findings directly in their research to miniaturize and generalize their "shoecomputers" for roulette.


The book goes into exquisite detail of the development and production of these devices, as well as the technical background for their approach, which was nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory.
A good/of the book is dedicated to some type of technical detail, with the rest being small bios of the various Eudaemons, though mostly focused on Doyne Farmer.
It should be noted that this audiobook was originally written in thes, and some commentary of the state of the art, is dated, especially the comments in the "coming of chaos science" which came and went around the mids, though thend coming of this subject may yet be upon us now in.


You'll learn about the circuit designs, the trials of instrumenting solenoids in foot and body computers, debugging signals using oscilloscopes, one really feels one understands a bit of how to build a simple computer reading this book Given the new era of computing that's upon is, it's really an appropriate book to read to get back into the spirit of architecting new computing structures, now that the VonNeumann computers may soon give way.
This book will get you in the mood to build something, It's a kind of depth that's usually missing in most modern nonfiction books, One hopes the sequel book on the Eudaemons innovations in predicting stock dynamics will also be made into audio soon.
Highly recommended.