In the late 1970s, a group of physicists and countercultural experimenters set out to do something casinos insist cannot be done: beat roulette through science.

They built miniature computers small enough to conceal in their shoes, developed a system for measuring the motion of wheel and ball, and entered Las Vegas carrying a piece of the computational future beneath their feet. It's something of a scientific history, technological caper and collective portrait of brilliant people attempting to force chance into obedience.

The book ranges well beyond the mechanics of the scheme. Bass traces the shared history of probability, gambling and computing—from Pascal’s mechanical calculator and wager on God to chaos theory, strange attractors and the practical problem of translating physical events into usable data. The casino becomes a laboratory where abstraction collides with friction, faulty equipment, bodily discomfort, human rivalry and the house’s considerable interest in preventing mathematics from becoming profitable.

It is especially good on the moment when computers were still strange physical objects built by hand rather than seamless consumer appliances: wires against skin, switches operated by toes, information transmitted through improvised signals. For readers interested in hacker culture, experimental science, probability or schemes sufficiently mad to become serious.

Penguin paperback, 1991; first Penguin printing. Moderate cover wear, rubbing and creasing; sound binding and clean pages.