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The Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took On Las Vegas

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The Eudaemonic Pie is the bizarre true story of how a band of physicists and computer wizards took on Las Vegas.

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1985

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Thomas A. Bass

12 books24 followers

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5 stars
68 (31%)
4 stars
81 (37%)
3 stars
47 (21%)
2 stars
16 (7%)
1 star
3 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
Profile Image for John Jr..
Author 1 book71 followers
May 15, 2014
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 the 70s, the story would be just what’s 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 this NYTBR review from 1985.

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 wrong—it may not have been poker or Dalí—but someone had devised a precisely pointless approach that neither won nor lost. Details like that added to the fun of this whiz-kids-on-a-mission 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 early 60s, 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/April 2014 issue of MIT Technology Review, which contains an unofficial review of today's best-known wearable computer, Google Glass.) But a paper by Thorp reveals that a future member of the Eudaemonians had contacted him "around 1969" to discuss the Thorp-Shannon project.

Why do the same thing again, 10 or so years later? As a merely technical matter, it's not hard to imagine an answer: improved hardware.
Profile Image for amy.
282 reviews
August 20, 2022
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 1, finally joins in the overall timeline (not just recounting everyone else's experience in a flashback of Chapter 1's events), we are over 200 pages 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 (1977), they parted like it was 1997 (the year after I graduated from UCSC). Go Slugs!
Profile Image for Chris Esposo.
680 reviews59 followers
January 28, 2019
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 mid-70s 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 high-level languages to build functionality for their Mac, and this started the digital computing craze of the 70s and 80s. Dowyne would go on to take these findings directly in their research to miniaturize and generalize their "shoe-computers" 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 2/3 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 the 80s, 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 mid-90s, though the 2nd coming of this subject may yet be upon us now in 2018.

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 Von-Neumann 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 non-fiction books. One hopes the sequel book on the Eudaemons innovations in predicting stock dynamics will also be made into audio soon. Highly recommended
Profile Image for John.
Author 1 book1 follower
June 6, 2008
I love this book. It tells the story of a hippie-physicist 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 military-industrial 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 front-end to the hippie-physicist intentional community. From 1975-1982, 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.
Profile Image for Miles Zarathustra.
188 reviews9 followers
October 9, 2010
Worthy 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 rags-to-riches tales, but consisted of many such bands of struggling Quixotic youth.

He also gets points for the obvious enjoyment he derives from the rebellious counter-culture. 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 mind-numbingly encyclopedaic enumeration of various people involved, evidently from interviews. Gradually, it morphs to a first-hand 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 (wire-wrap, the 6502). 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.

Profile Image for Paul.
1,187 reviews40 followers
December 30, 2017
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 dime-a-dozen, 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 no-computers-in-the-casino 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 Wired-quality 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.

1.5 of 5 stars
Profile Image for Bill.
4 reviews1 follower
April 20, 2013

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 purpose-built 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, re-trial, and in-theater operation through Bass' coverage was wonderful, compelling, and thrilling. And satisfyingly, ultimately redeemed those "wasted" hours.



The bizzare true story of how a band of physicists and computer wizards took on Las Vegas

* well, nearly
** of course I would say that.

Profile Image for Miles.
Author 1 book5 followers
July 2, 2014
Fascinating story, but I did not love Bass' writing style. I was very interested in the challenges to use technology to beat roulette (especially in the early days of the PC revolution), but I was less interested in Bass' clear affection for the characters, his digressions into the flora and fauna of Santa Cruz and Las Vegas (get on with the plot!), the fact that he became a part of the story half way through the book, and the ending, which I found anticlimactic. Despite all that, I found myself rooting on the team as they took the earliest PC components, cobbled them together, coded some physics algorithms, and tried to beat the bank at the casinos playing roulette. I would think that with all the updates in technology, this would be easier than ever to do, and couldn't help but wonder how the casinos try to detect and stop this kind of behavior today.
Profile Image for W.T..
101 reviews4 followers
June 16, 2013
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.
312 reviews
January 26, 2011
This is a look into a group of hippie geeks. They are physics students and graduates who try to create a shoe computer to take to Vegas to beat roulette. The concepts of the physics of roulette are well explained, as is the reason that physics is the only way to beat roulette. But what made this book stick out for me was how it described their lifestyles and choices. It was a very interesting peek into their lives.
Profile Image for Clare.
Author 1 book26 followers
July 6, 2010
I read this after The Predictors. Thomas A Bass has a fabulous writing style, and this is a fascinating account of early efforts with wearable computers. As with The Predictors, Bass is more interested in the process than the results, which can leave one feeling a little unsatisfied when things aren't wrapped up neatly at the end. Recommended nonetheless.
Profile Image for Art.
1 review1 follower
January 10, 2013
The most thoroughly enjoyable book that I have ever read! Carries us back to the innocent days of early 70's Silicon Valley. I would give almost anything to reverse time and join up with Doyne Farmer and his troupe of physicist-hackers...

And while there, I would invest HEAVILY in Santa Cruz real estate!
Profile Image for Jacob.
199 reviews10 followers
June 9, 2012
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.
Profile Image for Craig.
318 reviews13 followers
November 18, 2007
Some protocomputer geeks invent a shoe mounted mini computer to cheat at roulette. And it worked! (Incidentally this may document the last time anybody bought anything from Radio Shack that worked.)
Profile Image for Abby.
387 reviews65 followers
Want to read
June 11, 2008
I am now addicted to gambling...books.
Profile Image for Greg.
1,128 reviews2,147 followers
May 21, 2024
There should be more books about smart people beating things with their ingenuity and wits. I was actually looking to read the authors other book, about a couple of the people from this book who went on to beat the stock market, but this was interesting too. Like Edward Thorpe, this follows some people who decided that the impossible could be accomplished, beating games of chance using math and physics. Also like Thorpe, they had to do this by pretty much creating the computers necessary to pull off the feat.

It can be a little bit slow at times, when really most of the story is about trying to solve the problems of creating a computer small enough to be undetected in a casino starting in years when the personal computer barely existed, but its definitely interesting about how a group of very smart hippie physicists tried to free themselves from having to use their brains in the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex and instead had the goal of creating a meaningful lives by beating roulette.
8 reviews
December 27, 2025
Very good book I would recommend to others. The story of a group of people trying to beat roulette and take on Vegas was all I needed to get me hooked. But this is even more than that. It’s a bunch of geniuses all getting together with the common goal of trying something new and exciting.
Not only do they have to study roulette enough to determine that it’s predictable, come up with algorithms based on the speed of the ball, the inner rotor, the type of ball, and a ton of factors, but then they also have to figure out how to program a computer to solve this back when computers were in the early days
Gave 4 stars because a few times I started skimming (I don’t care what a character was wearing at a Halloween party, or need a detailed description of what an area looks like) but it’s still a fascinating story and a great read
117 reviews3 followers
September 27, 2021
I have read this book many times since it came out.
There are many books about the bohemian life of the artist, being broke and scraping by on your talent, getting enough to get by, but never seeming able to get the dream. Books about running off to France or Italy and buying a house and getting in way over your head. Fiction such as Lovejoy, about dealing in antiques and art and still having to stay two steps ahead of a collector.
This is a rare book that is about bohemian physicists. Living a communal life, ignoring other obligations until they become too unwieldy to ignore, solving problems to magically unlock the life they dream of, a commune on a larger scale.

Do they succeed? Like most things that consume a life, success depends on what marks the finish line.
Profile Image for Lorraine.
26 reviews
April 17, 2018
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.
Profile Image for pluton.
307 reviews11 followers
July 4, 2020
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 sub-story 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.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Road Worrier.
457 reviews2 followers
December 12, 2020
I quite enjoyed this book about old-school hardware hacking and geeky scientists making something impossible for the revolution and betterment of all mankind. The ending was unexpected and I liked the book all the more for that. Now of course 4 decades later the minaturization landscape has changed, and the technology in a single cellphone could probably do everything they were striving for. COTS... I feel bad only giving the book 3 stars and not more but "I liked it" I didn't "really" like it. Maybe I would have really liked it when someone gave me the book 4 decades ago, but I only got around to reading it now.
382 reviews5 followers
August 28, 2023
Capably told story about a group of physicists who figured out how to beat the house at roulette. If you're a serious geek about risk management, bet sizing or other aspects of gambling theory I'd recommend this book, but for most readers Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House tells a similar story better.

That said, it was interesting to see how gambling intersected with a group of phys... [see the rest on my book review site.]
7 reviews
March 8, 2025
Loved this book. Fascinating story about obsessed nerds.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 and caught the tail end of the particular type of nerd culture pervading this book. Reading about them acquiring components at Halted and Anchor Electronics were massive nostalgia triggers.

There was even a mention of Automation Industries in Danbury, CT, the company my dad worked at for many years.

My favorite line (no spoiler, it works without context):
"Anything worth doing carries with it tons of shit which is no fun to do"
305 reviews1 follower
July 21, 2019
Interesting story told with good mix of scientific and personal detail.
518 reviews2 followers
July 28, 2019
Roulette isn't random. The limits of this observation are discovered by this crew of experimenters. Memorably written.
14 reviews1 follower
November 29, 2020
Very interesting old school Vegas "cheats." Been meaning to read this one for awhile and finally did. Well worth it!
Profile Image for Dan.
15 reviews
August 6, 2022
This book had a super interesting story to tell. Unfortunately it told 9488 stories in great detail.
212 reviews2 followers
August 30, 2022
There was some interesting stuff here, and some entertaining scene-setting, but this dragged for me; a shorter version would make a better book IMO.
Profile Image for Quinton.
256 reviews26 followers
September 12, 2022
Fantastic story expertly told. Particularly interesting to computer geeks (which I am).
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