Cheating?

[DrScrumMaster]

http://news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/casino-cheats

Two Russians used high-tech tools for slot-machine scam [...]syndicate members were jailed yesterday for using sophisticated technology to record gaming machines at casinos and later predicting the next mass payout of the machines.
Russians Vladislav Logachev, 41, and Andrei Egorov, 33, were sentenced to 45 months and 30 months in prison respectively. Their accomplice, Czech national Radoslav Skubnik, 41, was jailed for 22 months last year. Logachev had pleaded guilty to six of 16 charges while Egorov had admitted to three of 13 charges.
Over three days in May last year, the trio won $108,995 from cheating at play at Marina Bay Sands (MBS) and Resorts World Sentosa casinos. [...] Syndicate members would form teams consisting of "a master" (team leader) and "players". After using the devices to record the play patterns of slot machines, the master would upload the information to an unknown server for analysis and decoding. The decoded data was then sent back to the master, who in turn distributed it to the players. Armed with the decoded data, players returned to the same slot machines with the devices, which would alert them to when the next big payout was going to be made.

I'm still struggling to work out how this is actually a scam of cheating.

They used computers instead of just their own heads to work out when was best the play the one-armed bandits, so what?

[x9200]

I'm still struggling to work out how this is actually a scam of cheating.

They used computers instead of just their own heads to work out when was best the play the one-armed bandits, so what?

They were not supposed to, so it was cheating.
Leaving aside whether something is fair or not, there are just rules to be followed and that's it. If one day one uses a superior to human bionic muscle in a regular sport competition, would it be cheating or not?

BTW, you may find watching the Rain Man movie interesting.

[DrScrumMaster]

BTW, you may find watching the Rain Man movie interesting.

Which is why I don't understand why card counting is cheating. Isn't that what one's supposed to do, just that some people do it better than others? I mean, you're supposed to remember what's been bid and played when playing bridge in order to work out what's likely to be in someone's hand.

[PNGMK]

When I was younger I worked on an early model (and designed a latter model) of the RNG used by the NZ Govt for a lottery system. I read up on the exploit used by these Russians and concluded it was a poorly designed RNG. They have somehow got hold of the same model RNG and using mobile phones are feeding information back to an RNG in Russia - when their masters have worked out the pattern they tell them when to bet using tactile feedback on the phone. This is a hard scam to beat and frankly I wish they had gotten away with it - I don't have a lot of sympathy for the casinos (in fact I wish they'd burn to the ground). In fact I'm sure others have gotten away with it and the casino will know this just from statistics of their wins. May the casinos burn to the ground and their owners / operators burn in hell along side them (I am anti legalized gambling).

[PNGMK]

http://wrd.cm/2kyWY5A

[DrScrumMaster]

Leaving aside whether something is fair or not, there are just rules to be followed and that's it.

Rules or not, why is it a criminal matter? Fouling someone on a football pitch does not get one arrested.

Oh I forgot, casino operators insist on governments enacting certain pieces of legislation before the casino operators consider gracing a country with their presence...

[x9200]

Leaving aside whether something is fair or not, there are just rules to be followed and that's it.

Rules or not, why is it a criminal matter? Fouling someone on a football pitch does not get one arrested.

Cheating so you gain some money is a criminal matter.

[x9200]

http://wrd.cm/2kyWY5A

Very interesting. Thanks for that link PNGMK. How is it possible that modern implementations of RNG does not rely on any human or environmental (i.e. temperature) entropy?

[PNGMK]

http://wrd.cm/2kyWY5A

Very interesting. Thanks for that link PNGMK. How is it possible that modern implementations of RNG does not rely on any human or environmental (i.e. temperature) entropy?

When we were designing RNG's (back in 1988) we looked at white noise being a source of randomness. That 'white noise' is ultimately cosmic radiation. Filtering down and sampling tiny amounts of slices of it is how we eventually got a 'PRNG' - we needed that because of regulation. A truly random number generator would have freaked out the regulator. The regulator's used bin tests (historgrams) and they want to see every bin level out for the number series... which is not random.

[PNGMK]

As for cheating my former boss from that time (and we ended up selling most of our design off to 'the boys from Vegas') said: "Some people will work twice as hard to cheat half as much. Now I don’t think cheating casinos should be a crime, though the governments who live off the casinos have a vested interest and do control the criminal law.".

[x9200]

http://wrd.cm/2kyWY5A

Very interesting. Thanks for that link PNGMK. How is it possible that modern implementations of RNG does not rely on any human or environmental (i.e. temperature) entropy?

When we were designing RNG's (back in 1988) we looked at white noise being a source of randomness. That 'white noise' is ultimately cosmic radiation. Filtering down and sampling tiny amounts of slices of it is how we eventually got a 'PRNG' - we needed that because of regulation. A truly random number generator would have freaked out the regulator. The regulator's used bin tests (historgrams) and they want to see every bin level out for the number series... which is not random.

But the white noise, wasn't it tabelarized at that time rather than recorded on demand?

[PNGMK]

Very interesting. Thanks for that link PNGMK. How is it possible that modern implementations of RNG does not rely on any human or environmental (i.e. temperature) entropy?

When we were designing RNG's (back in 1988) we looked at white noise being a source of randomness. That 'white noise' is ultimately cosmic radiation. Filtering down and sampling tiny amounts of slices of it is how we eventually got a 'PRNG' - we needed that because of regulation. A truly random number generator would have freaked out the regulator. The regulator's used bin tests (historgrams) and they want to see every bin level out for the number series... which is not random.

But the white noise, wasn't it tabelarized at that time rather than recorded on demand?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

The RNG generator generated 10,000 random 7 digit numbers (for lottery tickets). We had to run a report post draw that showed the "randomness" in a historgram. The RNG ran in real time (not from a playback) in front of regulators.

[Strong Eagle]

Dogs years ago, I was responsible for writing a jury pull system. Names (and ID numbers) were gathered from property tax rolls, drivers license registrations, and district clerk records.

As you know, most randomizers are only pseudo... put the same seed in, get the same sequence out.

Half the people in charge of jury pull hated it because they were convinced that wasn't really random, so I wrote a front end program that grabbed several bits and pieces of extraneous data externally... CPU load, disk activity on a couple of disks, CPU temp, etc. I used this to create the seed so no two runs were ever the same.

Now the other half hated it. A re-run of the program produced a different set of people who were to receive jury summons. We ended up going back to a named seed for each pull.

[PNGMK]

Dogs years ago, I was responsible for writing a jury pull system. Names (and ID numbers) were gathered from property tax rolls, drivers license registrations, and district clerk records.

As you know, most randomizers are only pseudo... put the same seed in, get the same sequence out.

Half the people in charge of jury pull hated it because they were convinced that wasn't really random, so I wrote a front end program that grabbed several bits and pieces of extraneous data externally... CPU load, disk activity on a couple of disks, CPU temp, etc. I used this to create the seed so no two runs were ever the same.

Now the other half hated it. A re-run of the program produced a different set of people who were to receive jury summons. We ended up going back to a named seed for each pull.

Ha. Yeah randomness is not really a thing in this deterministic universe even though we like to think it is.

[x9200]

PNGMK, what I mean, before the time of easily available PCs, random numbers from white noise were actually available in the printed form in the tables. I am surprised back in 80s you could that easily sample the noise with a receiver and convert it with some sort of DAC with probably needed 16 bit or better resolution and all this real time in a compact device. I am not saying not possible, but I am just surprised. Sounds to me like a challenge for that era, even in 1988. I would think, what was mentioned earlier, or even getting the pseudo numbers from the sound or light ambient noise would be much more optimal solution in any way.