Huge Mechanical Computers Used To Calculate Horse Racing Odds (hackaday.com) 63
szczys writes: The Pari-Mutuel system revolutionized how wagers were made on horse races starting in the late 1800s. It moved away from gambling against the house, and adjusted the odds based on how many people were placing wagers on a particular horse. Calculating and publicly displaying the changing odds was slow and labor intensive until engineers took a crack at the problem. They created Tote Boards; large mechanical computers which connected to each betting window with levers and cables. Each pull of a lever recalculated the odds which were displayed on large mechanical displays for all to see. Tote Boards were built all over the world and used until digital computing displaced them.
Most important question (Score:1)
Does it run analog Linux?
Re:Most important question (Score:4, Funny)
Does it run analog Linux?
Ubuntu still supports it, but only on Steampunk Stoat.
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Does it run analog Linux?
Sure, if you can keep the horses from eating the kernel...
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No wonder I saw Linus beating a dead horse.
LOL ... (Score:2)
My wife tried to explain how that all worked to me once; it didn't work.
So, I still make my bets on the ponies based on a combination of the name of the horse and who the house has given the shortest odds of winning. Usually I just bet the two horses who are handicapped to win but don't pay very well.
I can't win any real money, but the house often ends up paying for my betting, which is good enough for me.
The guys who read all the stats and the like? I question if they do any better than chance.
Re:LOL ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that means you are playing 3rd derivative performance estimation.
The track is playing 2nd derivative performance estimation by being a dynamic neutral party in the mass betting of people both less and significantly more informed than anyone running the track.
The guys who read all the stats and make the big bets are playing 1st derivative performance estimation, taking observed numbers and comparing estimates based on repetition of historical behavior.
The jockeys and horses are the raw data, and sometimes smelly.
You won't win big by betting on the likely outcome, but if betting is just part of the fun of watching the races, it'll work out in your favor much more than purely random or directly contrarian betting.
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It seems like they manage to turn a profit regardless of outcome at the tracks.
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The jockeys and horses are the raw data, and sometimes smelly.
And don't forget the trainers. At least on smaller tracks they can get away with doping up a long shot horse to make it win and pay long odds to those insiders who know which horse in which race is the one to bet on. All it takes is a small sleight of hand when the post race urine test is done.
Re:LOL ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things.
First, 'the house' has no stake in the outcome of the race, and never loses money on a race, so you are never playing with house money.
Second, 'the odds' are not the chances of the horse winning (which would be impossible to calculate), it is the amount of money you get paid if the horse does win. For instance, the amount paid for the 'win' position is determined by taking all of the money bet on the 'win' position (minus the tracks cut), and dividing it among the winning tickets. The odds printed in the program are just a prediction of what the BETTING will look like.
How do you think they calculate the predicted odds, which you use to make your selections? By studying the stats and the like. The fact that you don't lose much using your method shows that studying the stats DOES lead to a better outcome than chance (if you know what you are looking at, of course).
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As I understand it, random bets should yield about the same outcome. You just get fewer, larger payouts. Either way, the house is taking its piece, and you share the rest with the other players.
Ideally, the stats that matter are matching your knowledge of the race against everybody else's. If you know that this horse does better than people expect, or you know that some horse is a sentimental favorite but isn't likely to perform well, you can beat the other players and walk away with more than your randomly
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My office had an OTB move in across the parking lot. I used to take clients there and drink my lunch there. I won a ton of money - I was (and probably still am) well ahead. However, I learned to read the booklet that they have, where you can see who's done what and what their history is for the year. My winning ratio sunk. Prior to that I always bet on the "chariot" racing (sulkies/harness) and always bet on the guy named Banks or Banks Jr or I simply bet on #3 to win/place/show. I once won so much that I h
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I won a ton of money - I was (and probably still am) well ahead. However, I learned to read the booklet that they have, where you can see who's done what and what their history is for the year. My winning ratio sunk. Prior to that I always bet on the "chariot" racing (sulkies/harness) and always bet on the guy named Banks or Banks Jr or I simply bet on #3 to win/place/show. I once won so much that I had to pay taxes on it. However, as soon as some old guy showed me what that little book was for? I was sunk. I stopped going over and better after a little while - the magic was gone.
To which I can only reply, https://xkcd.com/552/ [xkcd.com]
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One of my favorites. The funny part is that I am, technically, a mathematician. (I hold a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics.) I even went so far as to buy a few books and see what I could crunch (keep in mind, I had a bunch of compute power across the parking lot and worked, specifically, with traffic modeling which is chaotic) and then tried to optimize my betting to maximize wins and minimize losses as well as figuring out where it was most likely to to result in a high payout.
After all that, I did worse. I ima
The big Mechanical Sigmas Derby's are droping like (Score:2)
The big Mechanical Sigmas Derby's are dropping like flys.
I herd not to long ago 2 where taken out back and shot.
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I herd not to long ago 2 where taken out back and shot.
Sounds like they shot the whole heard.
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I sea what you did their. Or maybe I herd it?
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From what I heard, when the Iowa-class battleships were reactivated in the 80s, they had to find old veterans who knew how to use the fire control computers.
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Before WWII, navies put a lot of effort into fire control, including over-the-horizon fire. The calculator you saw might be from WWI or shortly thereafter. The Iowa-class battleships were capable of getting a first-round straddle* on a moving target at about 35K yards.
*Battleship guns were normally adjusted to make a pattern of shells, to optimize the chance of getting at least one hit, at the expense of putting the largest number of shells possible into the enemy. All the fire control can do is to pu
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Last WWII fort I went to, they still had the trajectory calculator in place.
Where was this at?
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Smart gamblers ONLY bet on the horses (Score:1)
Bet against the house and you LOSE- this is one of the simplest facts of statistics. Idiots think this means all gambling is a mug's game. No, you gamble when you are betting against the OPINIONS of people, because people are predictable and non-scientific.
Professional gamblers play the horses, and known which forms of races to avoid. They look for mug punters shifting the odds in favourable STATISTICAL directions. No one bet guarantees a return- the betting strategy must be long term. The best races are hi
replaced by digital (Score:4, Interesting)
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Garbage. Antikythera mechanism, admiralty fire control table, a slide rule.
A gear, cam or rod can move by less than the thickness of a red cunt hair. Mechanical is inherently analog unless you really go out of your way to make it digital.
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For the record, "a red cunt hair" is an official unit of measurement in the British Imperial System. There is literally a red cunt hair embedded in platinum at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.
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That's the original standard of the RCH. In the early 1950s, there was a UK-wide search for the reference red cunt hair. After three years
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Basically the same way electronics is inherently analog unless you really go out of your way to make it digital.
Insight on horse betting is in Valachi Papers (Score:2)
I realize this article is about computing odds 'officially', but the book "The Valachi Papers" about mafia member Joe Valachi (Valachi didn't use the word 'mafia' himself; about that name he said that's "what you people call us."), has some insider scoop where Valachi talks about horse racing. He even owned some race horses himself. (Something most of his colleagues didn't BTW. He got into it by chance because some guy overheard his wife talking about a horse at a race track, and told her that, against c
Dear Slashdot, (Score:1)
Please make an effort to avoid linking to paywalled articles. It is very inconvenient.
Thank you
I actually read the article. (Score:1)
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Sulkies (Score:5, Interesting)
My grandpa taught me how to bet the harness races at Sportsman's Park. He had this arcane formula that involved eliminating the horses in the outside three stalls, the horses' last results and the names of the drivers. I'm not going to share the details here, because this is paramutual betting and I need you all to lose.
But let me tell you, grandpa always had dough. He used to say betting the harness races was for supplementing his Social Security and railroad pension. When he died, my mom gave me all his clothes, because grandpa was a flash dresser and we were about the same size. Of course, the styles were about 30 years out of date, but that worked for me thanks to nostalgia.
Anyway, the upshot is that one day, a few months after he died, I decided to try on one of his suits. I found a big roll of bills in the inside jacket pocket. Maybe 8-900 bucks. Then I looked in one of his cashmere overcoats: another grand or so. By the time all was said and done, I must have found $30,000 salted away in grandpa's clothes. Now this is a guy who was a Sicilian immigrant who went through the third grade and came to this country at age 12 to be a shepherd in Colorado. He worked for the Rock Island Railroad for like 45 years, but all that went into the house and the family. Everybody thought gramps was placing $2 bets at the track, but it turns out old boy was rolling deep.
I miss my grandpa and how he'd take me out to the racetrack when I was a kid and explain everything to me as if I understood it..
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harness races gate is lot of BS in the way it works.
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Sportsmans? In Cicero? Cool! I grew up just the other side of Cicero Ave on the Chicago side. My aunt and uncle used to race harness horses, and I'd go there every once in a while. They never won, but was still fun.
The clothes are a great story... you know about Storycorps right?
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Same place all right. I grew up around Taylor and Racine in the heart of Little Italy before UIC moved in.
I had a lot of friends from Cicero. Most of them are either in jail, in politics or dead. Some are all three, now that I think about it.
I know Storycorps. I like to hear the stories on WBE
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Used to be the same in Australia too where each state had its own government owned TAB agency that was generally the only legal off-track betting agency. And the money from the TAB went back into racing.
Of course the state governments were stupid and sold off these state TAB agencies to companies like Tatts and Tabcorp (all except Western Australia where both the TAB and lotto agency are still government owned).
The monopoly is gone though with online betting options from the companies that own the TAB, onli