Thursday 13 February 2014

Being a Valentine...Being someone’s One.



On Valentines Day, I have been pondering about what is the best love song of all time? And before you start to sway you hips and sing the Eveleigh Brothers while pretending that you’re just as sexy as Patrick Swayze or Demi Moore, I mean more what qualities it has, what exactly does it say rather than embarrass ourselves and sing WAM. 

On the one hand, there is the possessive, consumptive love song: Led Zeppelin’s ‘How Many More Times’  or more comically Lonnie Donnegan simply saying he” wants all my chidren to look like me” 

 “I'll give you all I've got to give, rings, pearls, and all.
 I've got to get you together baby, I'm sure, sure you're gonna crawl.” 

Dude, that ain’t love. That’s possessive masturbation. 

Then there is the ‘you and me ... doing stuff in a tree’ type song. 

Yuck, yuck and more yuck...

Not to hang the Zep, they did do a lot of ones that told a groovy story didn’t they? Like What is and What should never be, Fool in the Rain and Dyer Maker, but it’s telling a story using private language. Maybe that’s all love it. 

Then there is the good old fashioned sex thang – Paradise by the Dashboard Light, the Lemon Song or Deanna which is about possession, albeit maybe temporary. At least these songs aren’t hiding what they’re saying. But it ain’t love. 

I wonder if the best version of love songs would be songs that I believe are more speaking of love than psychotic possession and ownership masturbation. I am thinking of Blues Traveller’s wonderful “Maybe I’m Wrong.  

“Now it’s none of my business but I think I can make you happy.
But it really doesn’t matter if it’s me or someone else
All that I know is that I think you’re kind of special.
And one way or another I’m going to see if I can treat you well. “


Groovy.

Tuesday 11 February 2014

21: The Inside Story of a Group of Maths Geniuses from MIT who can’t Count.



 [Alternatively, the inside scoop on the first shit Kevin Spacey movie I’ve seen] 

Today’s thought is a conspiracy theory of sorts. The theory is that the entire concept of card counting is a marketing ploy by casinos themselves to draw in the punter. 



Long bow to draw I know, but let me explain. Did you know that the highest risk group of compulsive gamblers are male, university educated, between the ages of 25 and 35? Second highest, same except for female, not male. 

Firstly, that old analytical philosophy problem – 

Three hippie wannabes arrive just in time for the Woodford Falk Festival and ask for accommodation at the local backpackers’.  Unfortunately, the only vacancy the place has is a tiny room with only two beds. The manager offers to get an old folding bed he has lying around to accommodate three people if they would like. The three are quite put out; however as it is the only room left in town, decide to take it. The room rate is $30 per night, and the three each hand over a ten dollar note.
On getting the promised folding bed, the manager feels quite bad about not having decent accommodation left for the three guests and as he orders one of his staff to take up the folding bed to the room, hands the boy five dollar coins and asks him to distribute this money evenly to the three guests as a discount and apology. The boy, not being that smart, cannot work out how to distribute $5 between three people, so pockets $2 and gives each of the guests a one dollar refund, with a heartfelt apology.
So the three hippie wannabies have paid nine dollars each for the room (3 x 9 = 27) plus the two dollars pocketed by the bellhop, gives us $29. Question is – what happened to the other dollar?
And now back to the main event... 

IN Australia, we live in a culture that has a bipolar approach to the understanding of success, intelligence and destiny. We live in a country without a head of state, we love the monarchy at times, while at the same time yearn for the freedom that a republic will apparently bring. We live in the ‘lucky country’ but in many situations, the reliance on luck at the expense of knowledge or value appears un-Australian. By the same token, the smart, savvy know-it-all is the villain in many Australian cultural stories. 

It is the Aussie larrikin who still relies on advice and gumption that we admire, but only to a certain level of success. We admire this person not because they are successful, but because they have learnt to tap into a secret code of success. This is why they are successful, and by the same token, this is why we may be successful too, if only we knew the language. We admire stories that give pay dirt to this; the Da Vinci Code; Waltzing Matilda; the Packer Dynasty; the ANZACs and so on. All these stories are stories of luck and courage mixed with reliance on a certain form of intelligence. 

To take a specific case in point: counting cards in the game of Blackjack. This is seen as tapping into a secret code; a Da Vinci style understanding; a shibboleth of mathematics over reality. This code will make you successful if you both understand it, and have the courage and luck to take it further. It is the perfect contradiction of luck and knowledge. Courage is relevant too, but not to break the law or transgress social norms. It is more to take on the ‘big guys’ and dare to beat them.  

Technically, in most jurisdictions, counting cards is not illegal. The point at which an action breaches the law is when it interferes in some way with the natural order of a game. By this understanding, card counting falls into a grey area in some states, in other states it is not an offence as it does not in any way interfere with the play of the game in the way that marking cards or shuffling them inappropriately would. In many works of fiction, novels, cinema and television dramas, we may learn that card counting is not illegal, but ‘robs’ the casino of profits, and indirectly the general public lose out by the casino not having as much money.[1]
 
The act of card counting itself is not very mathematically complicated. The game of Blackjack is a simple game; two cards are dealt to each player, the player closest, yet still under a 21 score wins. Face cards are worth ten, aces are worth either one or eleven (whichever is more favourable to the player) and the other cards are worth their numeric value. Players may ask for more cards, up to three (at which point the player wins automatically), but if the value of the cards in front of them is higher than 21, they automatically lose. 

Card counting works on maintaining knowledge of what cards have been dealt out of the shoe as a basic average value, and thus the average value of the cards left in the shoe. As most casino croupiers are instructed not to deal themselves higher than 17, the higher the average value of the cards that remain in the shoe, the higher the chance that the player may beat that 17. 

There are many practical problems with this simple understanding though. The main and more obvious two are: firstly the greater the chance of a 10 value card coming out of the shoe is always equal across all players at the table, including the dealer, not just the players counting cards. Secondly, casinos were built by conmen and gangsters for conmen and gangsters, and as such are very good at detecting when the law of large numbers is not being adhered to; when someone is cheating, or using a successful system of any kind. 

Many stories of strange dyes, chemical compounds or X-ray glasses that enable a player to know the value of a card before it is dealt are recorded throughout history. One may guess that many more stories of how to cheat have been lost to history; most likely the more successful ones. Whether they are true or not, whether the gamblers were exposed as cheats is horses for courses really. It is not the way casinos deal with it. 

For example, if a gambler starts winning a large amount of money, someone pushes a button. If a gambler continues winning a large amount of money, many more buttons get pushed, or signals are raised in whatever way. Casinos don’t need to know how and why someone is winning a large amount of money to exclude a player. They don’t need to be fair; they don’t have to be open to everyone who wants to enter. They do not have to prove that a player was cheating, or explain themselves to an independent arbiter (such as a court of law) ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as the state does; at least in theory.  

The most wonderful story of card counting is the urban myth of the uber-smart students from MIT that apparently took Vegas ‘to the cleaners’. This has been the focus of speculation and romantic notions of brain over brawn the world over. It has been moulded into a very widely selling “non-fiction” book ‘Bringing Down the House’ and an ultra-Hollywood movie ’21’. The hook of this story is that in gambling (as in life?), there is some way that people may beat the house. In a pure game of chance, there is some knowledge, some secret, some Da Vinci Code, secret order, or perhaps some not so secret order to things that if one can tap into, one will win and be kissed on the arse by fairies forever. 

In reality, the deconstruction of the situation provides that the only people that this kind of story favours are the casinos. When people gamble too much, whether it is out of a non-specific impulse control disorder or just a slight, once off miscalculation; almost all the time can be simplified to an explanation of the patron thinking that they knew something; had some sort of control over the randomness of the situation. In the very least, the money lost by the casino for every one person that is actually able to control themselves enough to successfully count cards, would be made up for a hundred times over by a thousand gamblers whom only thought they could.

It is hard to trace the story of the MIT students who were involved as there are so many incantations of the story across time and circumstance. One of the simplest versions of the stories revolves around an MIT first year student named Andre Martinez, although other variations of this story refer to ‘real life’ inspirations of the MIT team being John Chang, J.P. Massar, Jeff Ma and Bill Kaplan. Interestingly, the movie and book both white wash these names; anglocising  them; Kevin Lewis and Ben Campbell are the central characters.  

Andre Martinez was apparently “an absolute genius”, so smart that on his third day as a first year undergraduate, he was “fast-tracked ... to graduate-level seminars”[2] by the never named maths professors at MIT. 

Yeah, right... MIT just decided to forgo the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition fees. 

Every once in a while, this story is retold with reference to Professor Edward Thorpe, also at MIT, and a real genius from the era of Bletchley Park fame; but a generation and a half earlier. When this happens, the role of Martinez is that of a student of Thorpe’s controversial 1962 book; Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One but one who was able to understand something that Professor Thorpe missed. The key ingredient in the being kissed on the arse by fairies spell that it would seem, no one else has understood. 

The explanation as to exactly what the 1990s MIT team came up with is never given. The notion that they played in a team, with spotters, gorillas and Big Players to avoid detection has been floated around. Apparently, according to the myth, the Las Vegas Casinos have never thought that people may signal to each other in teams on the gaming floor, and were unprepared for this outcome. There is also usually a further story about players being able to cut the deck to a specific number of cards down to bring out an ace. That an ace is of very little value on its own, without a ten value card is never really discussed. 

It is at this point that the already shaky story falls apart a little more than somewhat. This is the part of the story where maths geeks from MIT went to Vegas and were able to instantly transform into any random character that they thought may be a laugh; from a rich dot-com kid, to an Eurotrash brat to a woman, the theatrical abilities of these mathamagicians are capable of fooling Vegas casino floor managers. Everyone seems to forget, when hearing stories such as this, that if a maths geek is good at pretending to be someone that they are not, there is only one persona that they would wish to take on; that of someone capable of having sex. 

Remember that old joke; ‘How do you tell if a mathematician is an extrovert or an introvert...if he’s an extrovert, when he speaks to you he’ll look at your shoes rather than his own”. 

The idea that a Las Vegas Casino floor manager, who are required to pick a cheat, liar, drunk, thug or fraud out as part of their job would be fooled by something as silly as this is all but beyond belief. But the story also loses its grasp of maths at the same time as it loses its grasp of the realities of the abilities of maths geeks. For example, the actual state of play, as told by Nigel Goldman, in his recent book ‘Great Gambling Scams’ telling the story of the initiation of a new recruit into the MIT team, 

“...Then, quite suddenly, with only half a dozen or so hands left to go until the end of the shoe, Martinez suddenly bet $1,000. Kevin upped his ante to $500. The dealer dealt them both queens, and herself a five. Kevin’s next card was the ace of hearts, winning him $750, while Martinez’s was another queen. Martinez, against all casino etiquette, split the queens, receiving a face card on each, and then the dealer drew a nine, followed by a ten to bust. They had just won $4,750 on that one hand alone. ... The cards were coming out: Fisher got a ten, and Martinez a queen. The dealer received a five, and Fisher matched his ten with a nine, while Martinez received another queen. He had $1,400 in the box, and he chose to split the queens, normally a dreadful decision, but in these circumstances a fabulous play with the odds massively in his favour. ..... out came the cards, an ace and a ten. Bingo! The dealer dealt himself a nine followed by a jack to bust.”[3]
The mechanics, the maths of this story are way off. The idea that Martinez in both instances receives two queens is highly improbable to the point of ridiculous. This is matched by the idea that both players in both situations received a ten value card and one nine, while the dealer received a five on both occasions. On both occasions, the reason that the players won was that the dealer bust. It had nothing to do with counting cards. 

A better example of this is in the movie ‘21’. We see our now very European looking ultra-genius surrounded by seedy characters in an Asian casino, downtown. He is signalled by his Asian team member; giving off a slight inferiority issue; by an incredibly awkward arm gesture, then using the word ‘magazine’ in a sentence to indicate +17[4] from a pre-determined code. This is done in a way so awkward that everyone in the room would have known it was a code. 

Our Anglo-hero Ben narrates that the count is +18 after he gets a blackjack and the dealer received a 7, then 8. No it’s not Ben, you ultra genius. Here is the point where another of the severe failings of card counting in practice can be seen: while a pack may get to the improbable, yet possible mathematical understanding that it is +15, +16 or higher, to indicate the severe uneven distribution of cards dealt that have added an advantage to the player, every single card that is dealt after this point will diminish this count back to zero; the count must return to zero at the end of the shoe unless there are cards missing.
To take the example of Goldman’s second play above, the table has been dealt two queens, a jack, two tens, two nines, an ace and a five.  By the rules of card counting, this one hand would remove at least five points from the value of the deck, more if there are other players at the table. So a ‘magazine’ (+17) would become a +12 (a gaol bait?) in that one hand. And the main reason the players won is because the dealer yet again received the five, which is improbable to say the least.

 Even in the highly unlikely event that the shoe is still ‘hot’ after losing this much value, every winning hand will diminish the count by this sort of figure, so while the maths may work; it will not work for very long. The truth of card counting is that while it does work, it doesn’t give the player a very high advantage and it doesn’t work very quickly, you need to do it for a very long time to win any kind of advantage.
The role of the character of Cole Williams plays a strange part in the saga. Cole is, in the initial stories, a clever security chief who catches the MIT card counters in the most bizarre way. 

Sensing that there is a team at work counting cards, he makes an assumption that this team would be made up of college students and orders a copy of every single college year-book in the country and studies them all. As the story goes, the MIT team used their college year-book photos on a fake California ID cards used in the casino. The likelihood of this story being true is all but zero. The number of colleges there are in America, all of whom have tens of thousands of students, not to mention staff (who would represent a considerably stronger assumption on Cole’s behalf) coupled with the sheer volume of visitors to a Las Vegas casino would make the odds of someone correlating black and white photos in the tens, if not hundreds of millions to one. As previously stated, Vegas was built by mobsters and conmen, for mobsters and conmen; the way they identify cheating is the signal when someone wins large amounts of money, regardless of the circumstance. Then they beat them up, or spike their drink. 

But the role of Vincent Cole gives validation to the story. He is the one guy whose determination and gumption undoes the skill and smarts of our all American, all-anglo geniuses. Cole gives the story the understanding that it is easy to get away with counting cards, by juxtaposing the amount of effort and determination required to catch someone at it. 

In the movie, Cole’s character takes on so much more. ‘His’ casino was ‘taken’ for a seven figure win by Professor Rosa when he was absent from work. He was at his father’s funeral no less. As a result of this event, Cole was fired. 

Also of note is Cole’s character in the movie is played by the very talented, yet very non-European actor; Lawrence Fishbone. 

In the movie, an exaggeration from the book, Cole is depicted as the end of the old ways of things. He and his company and knowledge are being replaced by technology; “Biometric Facial Recognition Software” which will apparently make his role redundant. We hear him talking about whether card counting beats the system, only to see him pointing to his brass knuckles clad fist and stating “this is the system”. 

The book, Brining Down the House has faced some criticism and scrutiny since its publication in 2002 regarding the truth of what happened, by whom and when. John Chang, one of the real life inspirations behind the character of Mickey Rosa, stated that “I don’t even know if you want to call the things in there [the book] exaggerations, because they’re so exaggerated they’re basically untrue.”[5]
 
Ben Mezrich, the book’s author, claimed that “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable ... I took literary license to make it readable ... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”  This last statement: that something may be true in contrast, or at the expense of being able to be proven true is so vague that it bears little need for analysis. It is important to note, however, that the entire book is presented as a work of non-fiction; from the subtitle ‘The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions’ to the prose and chronological structure of the book itself; it is very much written, and intended to be read, as a work of fact. 

21

The movie ‘21’ brings Hollywood to Vegas. There is a love story; betrayals of friends and students; back room punch ups and Sir Isaac Newton being labelled a plagiarist. The opening sequence is of a poor kid, quite drably dressed, riding an old pushbike surrounded by cars zooming past. The boy, as we later find out, was raised by his mother, widowed and working class. He is poorly dressed, even though he works in an upmarket clothing store and is seeking only to attend Harvard Med School on a scholarship. To get this scholarship, he needs ‘life experience’ to ‘dazzle’. 

The movie introduces a love interest and a vengeful and vindictive professor character. The love interest, Jill Taylor, is older, smarter, considerably better looking and more popular, yet she spends the entire movie shy and subservient to Ben Campbell. She is comes from a gambling family. Her father and uncle lost a fortune on blackjack, and used to play blackjack every night with her as a child. The love story can be seen as the joining of the natural, yet innocent talent of Campbell with the experienced and pure talent of Taylor. 

The role of the vengeful and vindictive professor, played by Kevin Spacey, brings completely new dimensions to the story. Professor Mickey Rosa, a maths professor at MIT gives the all-American Hollywood lecture. It appears to last for three or four minutes as opposed to the traditional two hours; it does nothing more than pompously ask a question about Newton being a plagiarist; then provides an insanely brief account of a maths paradox the ‘game show host problem’ [sic] which gives surprise to everyone, including the professor, when our hero can answer it. This is made especially more surprising given that Ben is able to explain it, while omitting the main element that makes the equation work and seemingly misses the point completely. But the key understanding, that secret code, the Shibboleth; that private language is mentioned ‘variable change’ by our hero, and Professor Rosa is taken back by not knowing this student who had been in his class, sitting in the front row all year, yet had escaped Professor Rosa’s attention until now. 

Campbell makes that wonderful understanding when asked if his choice is being lead by a game show host, trying to use reverse psychology to trick him into losing. “I wouldn’t really care [if the game show host is trying to trick him] my answer is based on statistics, based on variable change.”

Ben Campbell stated that he would change his gamble based not on the actions of the game show host, but on statistics and variable change. He explains it as “when I was originally asked to choose a door I had a 33.3% chance of choosing right. But after he opens one of the doors and reoffers me the choice it’s now 66.7% if I choose to switch.”  

In reality, the ‘game show host paradox’ – generally referred to as the Paradox of Betrand’s Boxes proves the direct opposite point of view, that mathematics is a human invention, a language set up to explain the world that has massive failings in some circumstances. Bertrand’s Boxes sets up three possible boxes and asks one to make a choice about which one has the marble in it. A choice is given, then one box is removed by the host, leaving two choices, one of which being the original choice and one more. The language and rules of mathematics tells us in this situation that the probability of one’s original choice being right is 33.34%. This remains the case when one box is removed. So sticking to that choice, maths tells us, gives us a 33.34% of being right. If we were to change our choice to the other box mathematics tells us that we would have a 66.67% chance of choosing the box with the marble in it.

The point of the paradox is that this simply is not what happens in the real world. In the real world the chance of winning is only increased where the game show host knows which one is the winning one. Remove this point and you’ll remove the paradox. 

There can be a wedge drawn between mathematical theory, reality and outcome. These can be viewed as only two issues; firstly the inability of western thought to deal with the two concepts (or perhaps one concept) of zero and infinity. Secondly is the divide between addition and multiplication (or subtraction and division) that are falsely taken to be equivalent. There is perhaps another explanation in the notion that maths is purely analytical truth; that two plus two does not equal four, it merely is four by virtue of the definition of what four is.[6] But this veers too much into British philosophy for a story about gambling. 

Three hippie wannabes arrive just in time for the Woodford Falk Festival and ask for accommodation at the local backpackers’.  Unfortunately, the only vacancy the place has is a tiny room with only two beds. The manager offers to get an old folding bed he has lying around to accommodate three people if they would like. The three are quite put out; however as it is the only room left in town, decide to take it. The room rate is $30 per night, and the three each hand over a ten dollar note. On getting the promised folding bed, the manager feels quite bad about not having decent accommodation left for the three guests and as he orders one of his staff to take up the folding bed to the room, hands the boy five dollar coins and asks him to distribute this money evenly to the three guests as a discount and apology. The boy, not being that smart, cannot work out how to distribute $5 between three people, so pockets $2 and gives each of the guests a one dollar refund, with a heartfelt apology. So the three hippie wannabies have paid nine dollars each for the room (3 x 9 = 27) plus the two dollars pocketed by the bellhop, gives us $29. Question is – what happened to the other dollar?
The end of the movie sees a typical Hollywood wrap up; the same old American ‘Mighty Ducks’ meets ‘Police Academy’ with a little sprinkle of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. The protagonist loses his edge by losing his sense of identity then alienates his friends and contemporaries. He has a chi moment, asks for the trust and confidence of his friends both old and new, which they give to him (evidently they have not read Derrida). He then earns their trust back by pitting the bad guys against each other so that talent and honour win out over common sense and reality. 

Campbell gets his ‘dazzle’ for the scholarship, which he does not get, and the movie ends with a narrative from Campbell about how he went to Vegas 17 times and won “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and gained life experience and identity in some way. The viewer is left with yet another mathematical error: if Campbell had won his $350,000 in a one fifth share of takings (minus expenses) he would have to have won multiple millions, not hundreds of thousands. 

Gambling success, like most things in life, follows the rule that the better educated and disciplined you are, the greater your chance of winning. John Chang, the supposed real life inspiration for Professor Rosa’s character pegs the yearly income for someone on the MIT Blackjack team to be $25,000.[7]

Mike Aponte, the real life inspiration behind the Fischer character, claims that the most the team ever won was $500,000 in one trip. His personal highest winnings he estimates at $200,000. For some reason he can’t recall his greatest achievement to the cent, even though all gamblers can always tell you ever slightest detail about their ‘greatest win’. 

More importantly he has stated that the most the team apparently ever lost in a trip was $130,000.[8] These two have also greatly disputed the lack of discipline in Ben Campbell’s character in the movie, seeing it as a plot development solely to end the movie. Chang has stated that “Starting from the part where Ben loses control at the Red Rock and loses 200K, the movie takes off on a tangent that has no resemblance to reality. Our players were far too disciplined to even think of doing something like that.”[9] These two points taken together: that the team were very disciplined; and that they were able to lose $130,000 in one trip can be taken to understand the MIT Blackjack team’s operation as purely gambling. While they perhaps used strategies to make them better than the average, that is not the point. The point I wish to make is that they were gambling at a game of chance, with little to no control over the situation. They were using maths to hide this fact, and their loses, which is a true characteristic of a compulsive gamblers. 

There is yet a further observation to make. The real story of a person from MIT taking on Las Vegas happened more than thirty five years earlier. 

Professor Ed Thorpe, an MIT professor and a mathematician interested in gambling, but a generation and a bit before, tells the story in a different way. It’s the same story, but set in the 1950s and doesn’t paint the Las Vegas casinos as places of fun and tolerant of card counters. 

In “Fortune’s Formula” William Poundstone retells stories of the noble Professor’s drink being spiked, to the point that he could no longer concentrate after drinking it, of friends being beaten quite randomly and of the Las Vegas casinos dealing with card counting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Firstly, by not cutting the deck and playing with a blind eight deck shoe, and then finally by not playing the last portion of the shoe. This was the total and complete destruction of someone’s ability to count cards, no matter how much of a genius they were. The relevant part of a shoe; the last few hands, were simply not dealt. 

Have you thought of my main point yet? Have I made the point? 

...

Well, one final observation - while it is a very long bow to draw to say that this entire concept is a casino run conspiracy, it is true to say that the main people who benefit from the promotion of this type of story are the casinos. To seek to convince people that they can go to Las Vegas with a system that will allow them to win money is not something that will hurt a casino’s bottom line; it will most likely do the exact opposite. If that isn’t enough to arise one’s curiosity and cynicism, bear in mind that the movie 21 was financed by none other than the Metro Golden Mayer Corporation, owners of that iconic casino, the MGM Grand.
* * * * * * * * * *


[1] For example, see the American Television drama show “Las Vegas” where this theme is constantly raised.
[2] Goldman 2007 pp74.
[3] Goldman 2007 pp84, 88
[4] In the case of +15, this is the equivalent of saying for every ten value card dealt, fifteen low value cards have been dealt and thus the average value of the shoe remaining is high.
[5] Boston Globe FIND REFERENCE
[6] The counter argument states while that two plus one is three (as opposed to equally three) because it may only be stated as (1+1)+1; two plus two equals four do to there being two formulations [(1+1)+(1+1)]; or [(((1+1)+1)+1)]
[7] BlackJackInfo.com
[8] BlackJackInfo.com
[9] www.mickyrosa.com