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The Eudaemons' shoe computer

In the late 1970s, the Eudaemons designed and built various wearable computers for purposes of assisting a roulette player predict where the ball would land. Rather than attempting to predict the exact number on which the ball would land, they divided the wheel into eight octants, and attempted to predict which octant the ball would land in. It was not necessary to predict this outcome with high accuracy -- it was sufficient to occasionally (with probability only slightly better than pure chance) know which octant the ball would land in. In this manner, the apparatus was successful in providing a small but sufficient increase in betting odds, for purposes of winning money in the game of roulettegif.

In various implementations, two players would collaborate: one would watch the ball and click a footswitch each time it passed, while the other would receive this timing information wirelessly from the second person who was to place the bet. The shoe-based computer (Fig 1(d)) using a physical model of the roulette table, based on nonlinear dynamics, would indicate one of nine possibilities: a particular octant, or a ninth suggestion that no bet be placed. One of these nine possibilities was presented to the bottom of the foot in the form of vibrations of three solenoids which were each programmed to vibrate at one of three possible vibration rates (slow, medium, or fast). The person placing the bets would need to memorize the numerical values in each octant of the roulette table, as well as learn the nine different vibration patterns that the three solenoids could produce.

Steve Mann
Tue Jan 6 23:24:56 EST 1998