Roulette, Millions in money and A Cellphone
An alleged high-tech roulette scam that saw three people walk out of a London casino with 1.3 Million Pounds recently sounds too implausible even for a movie plot.
Reports suggest that mobile phones fitted with laser scanners can be used to measure the speed of the roulette ball when it was released, in order to calculate where it was likely to fall. The whole calculation would need to have been completed in just a few seconds, as the dealer cuts off betting after the ball has rolled three times around the wheel.
But the trick could be pulled off a lot more simply if the phones were used as stop watches, says Norman Packard, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, US. Just two equations - one for the ball and one for the wheel, which move in opposite directions - predict the likely area where the ball will stop. These equations comprise only a handful of parameters, including the mass and size of the ball, the shape and roughness of the track, and the tilt of the wheel.
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