When you're a magician, the question comes up often, "Can I take you with me to the casino?" Never mind that there are no casinos in Toronto, my background in math means I'm fascinated by gambling but know enough about the odds to not want to do it in casinos. The Royal Institute in London offers up its public talks for free online and I thought I'd share this really interesting talk about the intersection between science and gambling including using computers to cheat at the roulette and blackjack tables, the mathematics of shuffling applied to card tricks and strange ways to win at the lottery.
From the statisticians forecasting sports scores to the intelligent bots beating human poker players, Adam Kucharski traces the scientific origins of the world's best gambling strategies. Watch the Q&A here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0XxbHnf5ro Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe Spanning mathematics, psychology, economics and physics, Adam Kucharski reveals the long and tangled history between betting and science, and explains how gambling shaped everything from probability to game theory, and chaos theory to artificial intelligence.
And the Q&A to follow up:
Is stock market investing to do with luck or skill? Why do people counting cards tend to get found out? Are there any games that humans are still better at? Adam Kurcharski answers questions from the audience after his talk.