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Tonight's "Breaking Vegas" is about a family from Madrid that learned to predict the bias in roulette wheels.

One thing is particularly cool about it: with their attention to historical accuracy, they point out the detail that the ringleader used a Microsoft QBASIC program to run simulations. They flashed some of the source code, and it looked to me like a real loop that ran random roulette spins and created a histogram in an array.

They used the Spanish version of QBASIC, and the program's output is also in Spanish.

It makes me feel a little warmer when someone gets a detail right where everyone else would get it wrong.

Date: 2005-05-18 06:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pootrootbeer.livejournal.com
But was QBASIC's (pseudo)random number generator really all that (pseudo)random?

Date: 2005-05-18 06:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pentomino.livejournal.com
Well, they had a RANDOMIZE TIMER command in there.

Whatever they did, it worked; they won $1.5 million at Roulette.

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