The perfect bet : How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling

Overview: There is one thing about gambling that everyone knows: the house always wins. Lotteries are set up to guarantee profits, to the state. A craps game is a sure thing, but only if you own the table. Sometimes, however, everyone is wrong. After all, the reason that casinos ban card counters is that counting cards works. Indeed, for the past 500 years, gamblers—led by mathematicians and scientists—have been trying to figure out how to turn the tables on the house and pull the rug out from under Lady Luck. "An elegant and amusing account" of how gambling has been reshaped by the application of science and revealed the truth behind a lucky bet ( Wall Street Journal) . For the past 500 years, gamblers-led by mathematicians and scientists-have been trying to figure out how to pull the rug out from under Lady Luck. In The Perfect Bet , mathematician and award-winning writer Adam Kucharski tells the astonishing story of how the experts have succeeded, revolutionizing mathematics and science in the process. The house can seem unbeatable. Kucharski shows us just why it isn't. Even better, he demonstrates how the search for the perfect bet has been crucial for the scientific pursuit of a better world. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML 2001, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2001. The 50 revised full papers presented together with four invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 140 submissions. Among the topics covered are classifier systems, naive-Bayes classification, rule learning, decision tree-based classification, Web mining, equation discovery, inductive logic programming, text categorization, agent learning, backpropagation, reinforcement learning, sequence prediction, sequential decisions, classification learning, sampling, and semi-supervised learning. Ben shu shou you " jiu nian de xue ji ", " yuan fang de di ping xian ", " shou ling ye ", " ye ren ", " lao fang zi ", " xue mai ", " shou lie " deng zhong duan pian xiao shuo From roulette tables to racetracks, provides a look at how scientists and mathematicians throughout the years have tried to figure out how to beat the house while gambling