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COPYRIGHT 2004 American Association for Artificial Intelligence
The Eudaemonic Pie, Thomas A. Bass Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 1985, 326 pages, $19.95, ISBN 0-395-35351. Available from Lincoln, Nebraska, Backinprint.com, http://backinprint.com/.
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Picture wearable, customized, and embedded computers. Picture tactile feedback and situated computing. Wireless computing. Miniaturization. Portability. Machine learning and nonlinear modeling. Mining patterns and signals from noise-ridden data. Picture scientists contemplating computer-augmented human intelligence as the seed of the next punctuation in our species' evolutionary equilibrium.
Picture it all in 1976.
That's the year when a revolving cadre of scientists began work on the problem of predicting the outcome of the spin of a roulette wheel. Although lacking the societal import of, say, predicting cancer in a patient, or even poison in a mushroom, predicting roulette seems on the face of it of even greater difficulty. The game itself is designed in every way for unpredictability. The problem is at its core a machine learning problem with a direct physical basis. The history of AI is littered with machines designed to play the "games people play" better than those people play them. We have chess, poker, bridge, and Quake-playing machines; why not roulette? Certainly, the dream of AI engines finding and exploiting patterns among apparent randomness--especially among the world's financial markets--is alive and well.
Ultimately, the device the scientists created would fit into a shoe; would receive input in the form of toe taps; would radio to a neighboring shoe (on a compatriot's foot); and would output--in the form of tactile pulses--a range of numbers, the most likely winning numbers for the current spin of the wheel. Ultimately, too, the device worked. It proved to be capable of predicting well enough to spit out positive expectation bets consistently and convincingly. However, at its core, "the eudaemonic pie" is not about predicting where a roulette ball will land among 38 choices or even the onslaught of money that might follow. The story is more Wozniak than Wall Street--more garage hacking than greed. "Pie" is a story about having ingenuity and drive, living communally, bucking the system, and questioning society. It is a story of a select few who, on witnessing the dawn of the digital revolution, truly...
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