Well I’m hot blooded
Check it and see
I got a fever of a
Hundred and three
At the end of the first week Letty flew in from Los Angeles. She learned the betting pattern in a couple of hours, and then she and Doyne went to play roulette at Circus Circus. Initially, she was skeptical about her ability to take part in the Project. “If I go into a casino as myself,” she said, “I don’t fit in very well. I feel cloddy and out of it. And if I go as anybody other than myself, then I have to act, and I’m not an actor. I’ve always liked the idea of acting and admired actors, but it’s never been anything I had any talent for.” Her only prior experience on stage had been as a WAC in her ninth-grade production of The Mouse That Roared.
On her maiden appearance as a Eudaemonic bettor, Letty bought into a game and stacked her chips, before realizing that she had forgotten to turn on the computer. For men the power switch was in their pockets, but for women it was under their shirts. She excused herself for a visit to the toilet and returned to play a winning game of roulette. She proved a natural at using the computer. She was cool under fire, precise and attentive. The next night at the Holiday Inn she logged another winning session.
Letty had been what she described as “pillowcase adviser to the Project,” but now she also made some trips to the library to research the legality of beating roulette by computer. Although it is against the law in Nevada to tamper with the outcome of a game, predicting its outcome—by whatever means—is perfectly legal. Recent court cases have confirmed this fact in the instance of card counters. Everyone knows, though, that no matter how legitimate it might be to walk into a casino wearing a roulette computer in your bra, the bosses will undoubtedly think, and act, otherwise.
Apart from the danger of it, Letty had other doubts about the Project that were moral in nature. These had to do with social justice and right action, and they sprang, as she freely admitted, from her family background. A Boston lawyer of the liberal persuasion, her father balanced charitable work for civic groups against the bread-and-butter lawyering of trusts and estates. “My mother is of the old-fashioned school. She’s always maintained that politics is the highest calling.” While working in admissions at Radcliffe, Letty’s mother also served as fund raiser and board member for numerous social causes.
“I think there is a liberalism,” Letty realized, “that can be bred by growing up in a situation where you never need money. Making money as a justification for doing something was never legitimate. You had to explain your actions some other way. At times I yearned not to have any money, because then all I’d have to do is figure out how to make it, and life would be easy.
“When you aren’t lacking for them, the purpose of life is not to acquire things. Then what is the purpose of life? You fool yourself into thinking that it must be to help everyone else along. I was bothered from the beginning that the immediate purpose of the Project was to make money. Maybe it’s just my do-good ethic, but I always wanted a greater goal. Not that I ever thought the Project was immoral. It’s just that it didn’t promote some greater sense of morality, my own morality at least.”
In spite of her qualms about it, Letty understood the importance of the Project to Doyne. “Doyne has always felt that he’s lived a century or two or ten or a hundred too late. He’s yearned to be an explorer, an adventurer, an individual lighting adversity to build something he cared for. For Doyne the goal of the Project is money, which is freedom. That’s the immediate goal. Then he can go do things he wants to do. In the end he wants to be free in spite of society, the government, corporations, respectable people, and all the other upholders of order who say, ‘You can’t do this sort of thing. We want you on this road over here. You’re a nice respectable type with a Stanford physics degree, so why don’t you just join us?’
“The Project seemed a way for Doyne to make it on his own. There’s a big pot of gold at the end, and you, only you, have figured out how to get it. That you could beat these huge forces in a world designed to get every penny and not let a single one out, that you, just one person and your friends and associates could beat that system, that’s very appealing. And to do it from scratch, with no money, without selling your time or giving people promises, to do it through your own sheer wit and determination, to put yourself out there instead of being a passive cog in someone else’s wheel—that’s the attraction of the Project.
“Of course it has larger goals beyond making money. These involve working with friends to accomplish this very difficult task. It’s wonderful to think of rounding up everyone you know and using all their ingenuity and scientific expertise to work on a secret scheme, which you then have the fun and adventure of pulling off. It’s like doing a play together, where everyone has a role, either onstage or behind the scenes.”
After Letty’s winning sessions at Circus Circus and the Holiday Inn, the second wave of the Project rolled back from Las Vegas for another pause. They needed a break after a week of speed freak pimps, desert heat, and roulette computers insincere about whether they were on strike or just being flaky. Marianne and Chris headed for the Coast. Letty flew back to Los Angeles. Doyne and Juano were picked up by Tom Ingerson, who drove them south to Kingman, Arizona, where Juano was dropped off to hitchhike to Mexico. He got as far as Barstow before being robbed, stripped bare of everything including his eyeglasses, and deposited in the middle of the desert. It was a tale he lived to tell, and the culprits were later caught by the police, but Doyne’s sense of unease about Juano had proved prescient.
A reunion had been organized for the old Explorer Post 114, but in advance of the gathering Doyne and Tom spent three days camping together in the Gila Wilderness. During their conversations about the Project, Tom was stern. He thought it was a sinkhole of time and energy. He believed the technical difficulties would swamp them. He considered the dangers too great to offset any expected return. “He basically told me,” said Doyne, “that I was wasting my time.”
The third wave of Projectors—with Doyne and Norman driving up from Silver City, Alan Lewis flying in from Tucson, and Ingrid taking the bus from Davis—converged on Las Vegas early in August. They picked up a newspaper and drove around town looking for another apartment to rent. They settled on a two-bedroom walkup in one of the sleazier neighborhoods near the Showboat casino. The apartment was decorated in luau pink. Too many chain smokers had coughed up their lungs in these rooms. Down and out gamblers had probably done worse. The place had an irremediable air of lovelessness and transience, but the price was right. They moved in and within an hour were practicing on the wheel and biofeedback machine.
The allure of Las Vegas lies in money that you can finger. The New York Stock Exchange handles more of it every day, but the money there has been abstracted into certificates or digitized into read-outs. The money in Las Vegas is tangible and fluid. It rises in waves over the tables, eddies into whirlpools, and gets sucked again into the great sea of money that washes back and forth over the casino floor. Because these chips, coins, bills, and silver dollars slip so freely over and under the tables, a lot of people can be found walking around Las Vegas with money stuffed in their pockets. Consequently, as one would expect, there are a lot of other people who specialize in unstuffing these pockets.
Doyne had a chance to meet one of these specialists soon after moving into the Showboat apartment. “I frequently have trouble falling asleep. It was three in the morning and I was just on the edge of unconsciousness one night when I saw a figure in the room. ‘That’s strange,’ I said to myself. ‘What’s Norman doing wandering around at this hour of the night?’ ‘Norman?’ I called, and suddenly the person, carrying a piece of clothing, bolted out of the room.
“I jumped up and ran after him down the stairs. I was stark naked, and my penis was flopping around as I sprinted down the street at top speed, yelling, ‘Stop, thief!’ The sidewalk was littered with broken glass, and I normally wouldn’t have walked on it barefoot, mu
ch less run.
“About six feet tall, the thief was wearing cut-offs, a T-shirt, and track shoes. He was in good shape and obviously knew the neighborhood. But I was in good shape, too, having run five miles a day that summer. Going at an all-out sprint, I was gaining on him, and when I got within fifteen feet I screamed, ‘If you don’t drop those pants’—because it was my pants he’d lifted from the bedroom—’I’m going to kill you when I catch you.’
“My mother had given me five hundred dollars for a stake, and my brother had put up another five hundred dollars. That was the bank. So there was a thousand-dollar debt right there in my pants’ pocket that I couldn’t see any immediate way to pay off. Plus there had been another six or seven hundred dollars in cash in the room, along with traveler’s checks, chips, and silver dollars. When I had almost collared the guy, he veered into an apartment complex with locking gates, and I finally lost him where he could have headed in any number of directions.”
On returning home, Doyne discovered that one of the neighbors had called the police, who were soon at the door. They walked in to find the living room filled with antenna T-shirts, solder guns, and chips. “Someone had covered the roulette wheel with a sheet, but it was obviously a pretty weird operation. We gave them a story about being college students working on a summer research project in electronics. It turned out that all I had in my pants was two dollars and Ingrid’s driver’s license, which she had already lost several times that summer. But the incident scared us into keeping things better under wraps.”
The Projectors paired off into teams and tried to play both sets of computers at once, although it was hard to keep all four of them in working order. With radio receivers and wires perennially on the blink, Norman and Doyne functioned more as repairmen than gamblers. They filled the Blue Bus with tools and stationed it in strategic parking lots between casinos. Alan Lewis was having difficulty mastering the revised program, and he lost a few hundred dollars at Circus Circus before learning his way around the new mode map. The Projectors in general found themselves breaking up a lot of sessions because of malfunctions, shocks, spurious buzzes, and other hardware problems.
“Ingrid and I were doing better than the others” said Doyne. “Without any fantastic successes, we were winning at a steady rate.” The pattern changed suddenly one night when they were playing roulette at the Lady Luck down on Fremont Street. “We found a slow wheel with good tilt,” said Doyne. “I had set the parameters just right, and we were basically ready to kill them. So we dug in and started playing. But we were the only people at the table, and we were getting a lot of heat from the pit boss, more than we had ever had before. And Ingrid was acting strange. She was jerky and nervous, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”
“The pit boss,” said Ingrid, “was a tall, weasely fellow who must have sensed we were nervous. I was acting strange only because I was getting shocked by the antenna wire over my left breast. The shocks came more and more often, until I got muscle spasms and had a hard time remembering the betting pattern. But we were winning a lot of money; so I thought I should keep going.”
“We made several hundred dollars in our first few minutes at the table,” said Doyne. “When you hit successive throws, the money comes extremely fast, and this time it was quick, really quick. Even with perfect parameters, there are statistical fluctuations that keep you from winning every time. But when the conditions are good, the winning predictions can come right on top of each other. Suddenly I saw two plainclothes detectives standing off to my left in front of the wheel. I gave Ingrid the signal to lower the bets. But she raised them instead, and we hit on a five-dollar chip and then another. She was pushing the stakes hard.
“Standing next to me were these large men with potbellies, and I overheard one of them say to the other, ‘You see that woman betting on number nine? I could swear she knows where the ball is going to come off.’ They obviously didn’t realize I had anything to do with Ingrid, but I cashed out and left anyway.”
When they met later in the parking lot, Doyne discovered why Ingrid had been acting strangely. The solenoids on her stomach had seized up, which overheated the wires running from there to the computer in her bra. On undressing, she found that the wires had actually burned a hole in her chest. “When I saw the charred flesh,” said Doyne, “I couldn’t believe it. ‘Ingrid,’ I said, ‘I want you to try, but not that hard. I don’t want your burnt skin as an offering to roulette.’”
10
Sensitive Dependence
on Initial Conditions
You can’t know how happy
I am that we met,
I’m strangely attracted to you.
Cole Porter
“It’s All Right with Me”
Robert Stetson Shaw, stoop-shouldered and bearded, looked something like Woody Allen impersonating Karl Marx. A physicist and founding member of the Chaos Cabal, he possessed talents in realms as diverse as gag writing and musical composition. “If I don’t get my research grant this year,” he once quipped, “I’m going to go home and live with my mother. Then they’ll see what can be done with an abacus!”
When not living in a New Mexico commune or sleeping next to his computer in the physics laboratory, Shaw was a sometime resident at 707 Riverside, where he kept his piano stored in what came to be known as the music room. He would slip into the room at odd hours of the day and night, shut the door behind him, and play the piano for hours on end without pause. An appreciative audience would gather in the hallway to sit with their backs to the wall. They listened through the door to an amazing stream of sound: a nonstop, virtuoso performance of Bach (especially the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue), Mozart, Scarlatti, and Shaw’s own compositions, which incorporated styles ranging from classical to ragtime. He played from memory and composed sonatas with the ease of a jazz player feeling his way into a riff.
Doyne described Rob as “catalyst and seer of the Chaos Cabal,” but Shaw owed his career as a physicist to nothing more calculated than being in the right place at the right time. He was a graduate student shuffling through life with his customary reticence when Bill Burke, a physics professor at the university, asked him to look at a strange set of differential equations. Burke knew that Rob had dragged an analog computer out of the basement of the physics building, and he also knew that this machine provided the perfect tool for looking at the behavior of differential equations.
What Rob saw on programming his computer with Burke’s formulas sent shivers running up and down his spine. It was a moment of Archimedean discovery in which he sat staring at something completely new. Through iteration—a kind of mathematical stutter in which computers solve a problem over and over again—the machine had taken Burke’s equations and tipped them from order into chaos. But this chaos had characteristics unlike the random behavior that physicists had previously known as chaos. First, it had been generated out of a simple system, and, second, the chaos itself displayed various kinds of internal order. Classical physics has always assumed that the complex behavior of randomness would only be described, if ever, by equally complex equations. But Shaw, on his first glimpse into the terra incognita of chaos, had discovered that the opposite was true. Chaos can be generated out of simple systems merely by iterating, or looping, them through the kind of regressive cycles that computers—and compulsive neurotics—never tire of making.
With Burke’s equations programmed into his machine, Rob could actually draw pictures of this strangely ordered and deterministic chaos. Swirled onto the screen of a cathode-ray tube, the pictures looked variously like doughnuts or funnels or galaxies stretched out of shape. These diagrams of a world in which randomness and order coexist represent what are known in physics as strange attractors. Of the three basic kinds of attractor, the simplest is called the fixed point. Imagine a pan of water shaken so that waves roll over its surface. Stop shaking the pan and the waves dissipate, with the water eventually returning to a state of equilibrium. The water at rest h
as resumed what is known mathematically as its fixed point of attraction. The second kind of attractor, called the limit cycle, produces a regular motion repeated over and over again. Limit cycle attractors are found in waves rolling in and out along a coastline, or in the behavior of water rocking from side to side as it flows down a pipe.
Classical physics up to the present has been mystified by attractors more complex than those that are fixed or cyclical. If water in a pipe flowed in anything other than a smooth, or laminar, fashion, its behavior entered the previously inexplicable realm of turbulence. But the doughnuts and lopsided galaxies drawn by Shaw on his computer were pictures of turbulence, and in this case the turbulence was not random or mysterious or inexplicable. It had been generated out of a deterministic system, and it manifested its own forms of internal order. To explain the order that Shaw had discovered in chaos, one needs to understand the third basic kind of attractor, known as the strange attractor.
Think again of water flowing down a pipe. Now put an obstruction in the pipe. The water, if flowing slowly enough, will divide smoothly around the obstruction and meet again on the other side. Now place a drop of ink in the water. In the slow-moving current, the ink drop will pass around the obstruction and swing back to rejoin the central flow. But if you increase the water pressure in the pipe, at some critical velocity the flow lines on the other side of the obstruction, instead of rejoining each other, will start to wiggle. This wiggling is at first periodic, so that our ink drop flowing down the pipe will still exhibit predictable behavior. But by cranking up the velocity of the water still further, the drop will commence to behave chaotically, and it is by means of attractors—not fixed or cyclical, but strange—that one follows the chaotic ink drop as it tumbles down the pipe.
The Eudaemonic Pie Page 19