Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello everyone, Happy New Year. The Cautionary Tales team
Speaker 1: is busy putting together a set of brand new cautionary
Speaker 1: tales for the year ahead. Happiness Cults, a race around
Speaker 1: the world, and some lessons from the front lines of
Speaker 1: finding love and much more, all on its way. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, don't forget We've got a Cautionary Club over
Speaker 1: on Patreon, where you can find loads of bonus content,
Speaker 1: extra cautionary tales, interviews with me and the team, and
Speaker 1: an exclusive newsletter. Now, while you're setting your sights on
Speaker 1: what twenty twenty six could look like, here's a cautionary
Speaker 1: tale from the archives which might help enjoy. It would
Speaker 1: be hard to think of a better example of a
Speaker 1: game of chance than Roulette. Beneath the romantic French terminology
Speaker 1: and the myriad rules of etiquette, each spin of the
Speaker 1: roulette wheel is utterly random. The casino's advantage is small
Speaker 1: that it cannot be overcome. The game is remorseless over
Speaker 1: the long haul. The only way to win is not
Speaker 1: to play, or is it. One day in August nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon stroll up to a
Speaker 1: roulette table in Las Vegas, pretending not to know their companions,
Speaker 1: Ed and Vivian Thorpe. Claude and the ladies are nervous,
Speaker 1: but they don't show it. Ed Thorpe isn't nervous, he's excited.
Speaker 1: He's still in his twenties, but he's an old hand
Speaker 1: and the casinos Claude. Shannon stands right by the wheel.
Speaker 1: He's forty five years old, slim and good looking, with
Speaker 1: fine cheekbones and dark eyebrows. He's directing the attention of
Speaker 1: the floor manager by scribbling down numbers. He looks like
Speaker 1: he's got some crazy system that will inevitably bankrupt him.
Speaker 1: Thorpe is at the other end of the table, far
Speaker 1: from the wheel and far from Shannon. He has dark hair,
Speaker 1: a round face, and a smile. He's having fun placing
Speaker 1: his bets with the confidence of a man who knows
Speaker 1: the unbeatable game is about to be beaten. This is
Speaker 1: a defining moment in a project that has been quietly
Speaker 1: ticking over for a year. When it began, Thorpe and
Speaker 1: Shannon didn't know each other. Edward O. Thorpe was a
Speaker 1: junior mathematics instructor at MIT. Claude, Shannon was the greatest
Speaker 1: computer scientist in the world. Ed Thorpe had a plan
Speaker 1: to beat Roulette, and he needed Shannon to help him.
Speaker 1: Systems to beat Roulette are like blueprints for perpetual motion
Speaker 1: machines or formulas to turn lead into gold. Third, the
Speaker 1: pseudo scientific obsessions of Cranks and Claude. Shannon's secretary had
Speaker 1: already warned Thorpe that Professor Shannon doesn't spend time on
Speaker 1: topics or people that don't interest him. Shannon was a
Speaker 1: legendary figure. People in his field talked about Shannon the
Speaker 1: way physicists talk about Albert Einstein. What Ed Thorpe was
Speaker 1: doing was much like buttonholing Einstein and saying, Hey, Albert,
Speaker 1: I've got a surefire scheme for beating the bookies at
Speaker 1: the racetrack. An unknown young mathematician a patently futile goal.
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon, the computing legend, didn't hesitate. Take a seat.
Speaker 1: He said to Ed Thorpe, we have a lot to
Speaker 1: talk about. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Repeat.
Speaker 2: Please please send floor for the present.
Speaker 1: How do you receive send flower? Please see if you
Speaker 1: can read this?
Speaker 2: Can you read this, Yes, how are signals?
Speaker 1: Do you receive? Please send something? Please send thees and bees?
Speaker 3: How are signals?
Speaker 1: Those messages from eighteen fifty eight represent a full day
Speaker 1: of attempted conversation via Morse code. Who are cable? Lying
Speaker 1: three miles under the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The
Speaker 1: cable had been enormously expensive, and as you might guess,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really working. In an attempt to boost the signal,
Speaker 1: the project's engineer, a man called Wildman white House, cranked
Speaker 1: up the vault. The cable melted. It had survived only
Speaker 1: twenty eight days. Over the years, telegraph engineers figured out
Speaker 1: how to work around the problem of noise on the line.
Speaker 1: They built stronger cables with better insulation and more sensitive
Speaker 1: detectures at the far end. But nobody fully solved the
Speaker 1: problem of noise. Nobody even fully understood it. Not until
Speaker 1: nearly a century later, along came Clawed Shannon. Shannon's career
Speaker 1: was defined by two thunderbolts of insight. When he was
Speaker 1: twenty one in nineteen thirty eight, his master's thesis showed
Speaker 1: that any logical statement could be evaluated by a machine,
Speaker 1: with true or false being represented by switches being open
Speaker 1: or closed those dots and dashes of Morse code, which
Speaker 1: as to hint at the possibilities. Armed only with open
Speaker 1: or closed on or off dot or dash zero or
Speaker 1: war machines could perform any operation in mathematics or logic, and,
Speaker 1: rather than merely proving the point in abstract, Shannon, who
Speaker 1: was barely old enough to buy a beer, showed electrical
Speaker 1: engineers how to efficiently build a logic machine. Claude Shannon
Speaker 1: had bridged the vast gap between electrical wiring diagrams and
Speaker 1: thought itself unlocking the age of the digital computer. Shannon's
Speaker 1: second Thunderbolt was published in nineteen forty eight, when he
Speaker 1: was working at Bell Labs alongside several future Nobel Prize winners,
Speaker 1: including the team that invented the transistor. Shannon returned to
Speaker 1: the deep problem underlying the Transatlantic cable fiasco. He created
Speaker 1: a unified mathematical theory of transmitting information. Some of that
Speaker 1: theory seems obvious from the viewpoint of the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: We now take it for granted that information bits and
Speaker 1: bytes and gigabytes might represent anything a computer game or
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet, or music or pornography. But that idea started
Speaker 1: with Shannon. Before him, researchers only dimly grasped the distinction
Speaker 1: between the meaning of a message and the quantity of
Speaker 1: information it contained. The idea of compressing a file so
Speaker 1: that it took up less space was Shannon's, and so
Speaker 1: too was the utterly radical idea that any amount of
Speaker 1: noise on a line could be overcome. We didn't do
Speaker 1: that by cranking up the voltage and melting the undersea cable,
Speaker 1: nor did you need to build a better listening device
Speaker 1: or a thicker cable. No matter how much distortion there was,
Speaker 1: you could convey any message if you had enough patience.
Speaker 1: All you had to do was add redundancy to the data.
Speaker 1: It's the inverse of compressing a file. You add extra
Speaker 1: data to make the message more likely to be recoverable.
Speaker 1: Even in the presence of interference. That idea was unthinkable,
Speaker 1: right up to the point that Claude Shannon proved how
Speaker 1: to do it. This new theory of information was revolutionary
Speaker 1: and so elegant and general that it could be applied
Speaker 1: to anything from the Internet to genetic information in DNA,
Speaker 1: even though the Internet did not then exist, and the
Speaker 1: double helix structure of DNA had not yet been discovered.
Speaker 1: Shannon wasn't merely ahead of his time. He was the
Speaker 1: one who had wound the clock and set it running.
Speaker 1: All this and he'd barely turned thirty. So what did
Speaker 1: Shannon do for an encore? Is a description from his biographers,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman of Shannon's work ethic. Shannon
Speaker 1: arrived late, if at all, and often spend the day
Speaker 1: absorbed in games of chess and hex in the common areas.
Speaker 1: When not besting his colleagues at board games, he would
Speaker 1: be found piloting a unicycle through Bell Labs's narrow passageways,
Speaker 1: occasionally while juggling. Sometimes he would pogo stick his way
Speaker 1: around the Bell Labs campus, much to the consternation we
Speaker 1: imagine of the people who signed his paychecks. Shannon wasn't
Speaker 1: goofing off completely. He often worked hard, but the projects
Speaker 1: he worked on seemed whimsical. For example, he spent many
Speaker 1: hours at home playing with a colossal erector set. He
Speaker 1: built a robot mouse that could explore a maze and,
Speaker 1: by trial and error, on the first attempt, learn how
Speaker 1: to reach its target flawlessly. On the second run, the
Speaker 1: robot mouse was clever and thought provoking, and it might
Speaker 1: have represented real progress towards artificial intelligence if Shannon had
Speaker 1: persisted with it. But he didn't. Shannon built perhaps the
Speaker 1: first chess playing computer, albeit one that could play only
Speaker 1: a radically simplified setup the end game with six pieces.
Speaker 1: He published a theoretical paper on computer chess. It could
Speaker 1: have been the start of something, but again he lost interest.
Speaker 1: It seemed a shame. If anyone could make progress with
Speaker 1: computer chess, surely it was Shannon. He was good. Shannon
Speaker 1: once traveled to Moscow and played chess with three time
Speaker 1: world champion Mikhail Botvinick, and he made Botvinick sweat. When
Speaker 1: it wasn't chess, it was juggling. Shannon tried to figure
Speaker 1: out how to juggle upside down by hanging from the
Speaker 1: ceiling and bouncing the balls off the floor. He built
Speaker 1: juggling robots too, and a variety of machines designed to
Speaker 1: play abstract games, such as Hex and a Rubik's Cube
Speaker 1: solving robot, and the Juggleometer, and a flame throwing trumpet
Speaker 1: and the Ultimate Machine. The Ultimate Machine is a box
Speaker 1: with a switch and a trapdoor, and you flick the
Speaker 1: switch to turn it on. A robot finger pops out
Speaker 1: of the trapdoor and flips the switch back again to
Speaker 1: turn itself off. Shannon made giant styrofoam shoes so he
Speaker 1: could walk on water at a nearby lake. After Shannon
Speaker 1: learned to juggle, ride a unicycle and walk a tightrope,
Speaker 1: he formulated the aim of juggling on a unicycle on
Speaker 1: a tightrope Alas he never got further than two out
Speaker 1: of three, Claude Shannon's boss, Henry Pollock, said, Shannon has
Speaker 1: earned the right to be non productive, and of course
Speaker 1: he had. But come on, you're a genius, Claude. You're
Speaker 1: thirty three years old, You're the Einstein of computer science,
Speaker 1: and you're unicycling, poe going and playing board games. Shannon
Speaker 1: never again published anything like his theory of information. He
Speaker 1: never even came close. Once he promised the editor of
Speaker 1: Scientific American an article on the physics of juggling. If
Speaker 1: that didn't seem trivial enough, he followed it up with
Speaker 1: an unapologetic letter. You probably think I've been frittering, I say,
Speaker 1: frittering away my time while my juggling paper is languishing
Speaker 1: on the shelf. This is only half true. I have
Speaker 1: come to two conclusions recently. One, I am a better
Speaker 1: poet than scientist. Two scientific American should have a poetry
Speaker 1: column instead of his juggling research. Shannon enclosed a seventy
Speaker 1: line poem about Rubik's Cubes, to be sung to the
Speaker 1: tune of Tarara Bundier. He added, I'm still working on
Speaker 1: the juggling paper. Shannon never finished it. Not only was
Speaker 1: he not producing thunderbolts, he wasn't even producing a study ofuggling.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we should not be surprised that Claude Shannon was
Speaker 1: happy to put aside serious research when the young mathematician
Speaker 1: Ed Thorpe approached him for help in hacking the roulette
Speaker 1: table in Vegas. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: If we know anything, we know we're supposed to stick
Speaker 1: to a task. Psychologists have developed some attractive ideas about
Speaker 1: how success depends on practice and determination. There's Angela Duckworth
Speaker 1: who's popularized the idea of grit, Carol Dwex's research on
Speaker 1: the growth mindset and the late and as Ericsson, the
Speaker 1: source of the ten thousand hour rule made famous by
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. There are subtleties to each of these research programs,
Speaker 1: but the versions that have broken into pop culture are
Speaker 1: simple enough, like some motivational poster.
Speaker 3: Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Speaker 3: Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people
Speaker 3: with talent. Genius will not unrewarded genius is almost a proverb,
Speaker 3: the slogan press iron has solved and always will solve
Speaker 3: the problems of the human race.
Speaker 1: Isn't that great? It's often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge,
Speaker 1: but it's older than that. Claude Shannon, however, seems not
Speaker 1: to have gotten the message. He achieved so much, but
Speaker 1: if it's stuck to a task, couldn't he have achieved
Speaker 1: so much more? Instead, he was playing with flame throwing trumpets,
Speaker 1: juggling robots, and silly poems, oh, and the impossible task
Speaker 1: of beating the casino at roulette. For a junior academic
Speaker 1: ed thought, Thorpe spent a surprising amount of time in casinos.
Speaker 1: Using some ferocious mathematics and the best computers he could
Speaker 1: access at MIT, Thorpe had figured out that it was
Speaker 1: possible to beat the dealer at the casino staple blackjack
Speaker 1: by keeping track of the cards that had been played
Speaker 1: in placing bets when the deck was offering favorable odds.
Speaker 1: Card counting is a familiar idea these days. It all
Speaker 1: started with Ed Thorpe. Thorpe's ideas were sophisticated enough to
Speaker 1: be worth publishing as an academic paper, which he did,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't content with that. He wanted to beat
Speaker 1: the casino too. To do that, Thorpe had to learn
Speaker 1: to spot crooked dealing, where a disguise count cards unobtrusively
Speaker 1: late into the night, and above all, make sure he
Speaker 1: didn't get killed. That was no idle worry. One day,
Speaker 1: Thorpe made a little too much money and the casino
Speaker 1: spiked his coffee with something mysterious that blurred his vision
Speaker 1: for hours. He came back the next day and the
Speaker 1: casino tried it again, but Thorpe wasn't scared. His idea
Speaker 1: to beat roulette was the boldest of all. He didn't
Speaker 1: have in mind a clever mathematical system. There are loads
Speaker 1: of them, and he knew that none of them work. Instead,
Speaker 1: he planned to build a computer that could predict where
Speaker 1: the ball would land. That would be hard even today,
Speaker 1: but at a time when computers were the size of pianos.
Speaker 1: This computer needed to be one that you could conceal
Speaker 1: inside your clothes, the world's first wearable computer, decades before
Speaker 1: the fitbit, Google Glass or the Apple Watch. Thorpe had
Speaker 1: done some experiments on the timing of a roulette wheel
Speaker 1: with his wife, Vivian, a woman who was both intelligent
Speaker 1: and indulgent, as you'd need to be if you were
Speaker 1: marriage to Ed Thorpe. But to crack the problem he
Speaker 1: needed to team up with perhaps the best gadgeteer in
Speaker 1: the world, Claude Shannon. Thorpe spent twenty hours a week
Speaker 1: at Shannon's house. He was in heaven.
Speaker 2: The basement was a gadgeteer's paradise, molders, transistors, switches, pulleys, gears, condensers, transformers.
Speaker 2: I was now happily working with the ultimate gadgeteer.
Speaker 1: Shannon and Thorpe were able to time the spinning of
Speaker 1: the ball around an upper loop and the contrary motion
Speaker 1: of the wheel itself. With practice, they were able to
Speaker 1: start a clock within one hundredth of a second and
Speaker 1: then stop the clock after ten revolutions. That gave them
Speaker 1: both the speed and the position of the ball. Relative
Speaker 1: to the wheel, and Newtonian physics could do the rest.
Speaker 1: The result of months of experimentation taught them that using
Speaker 1: their computer to compute the path of the ball, they
Speaker 1: could put that it would fall into one of five
Speaker 1: numbers just over one eighth of the wheel and expect
Speaker 1: to be right twenty percent of the time. It seems
Speaker 1: a modest advantage, but the potential profits were enormous. All
Speaker 1: they had to do was to figure out how to
Speaker 1: miniaturize that computer, making it small enough to slip into
Speaker 1: a pocket and carry into the casino undetected. It was
Speaker 1: an astonishingly audacious project and a huge effort. For the
Speaker 1: final three weeks, Thorpe was effectively living at Shannon's house,
Speaker 1: but by August nineteen sixty one, the device was ready
Speaker 1: with their accomplices, Vivian Thorpe and Claude's wife, the mathematician
Speaker 1: Betty Shannon. The two gadgeteers then took it to the casinos.
Speaker 1: The Einstein of computer science was going to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Looking at Claude Shannon's career from age thirty three onwards,
Speaker 1: it's hard to escape the conclusion that he might have
Speaker 1: achieved more, much more, if not for his habit of
Speaker 1: flitting between whimsical projects and typically setting them aside before
Speaker 1: they were finished. But some very smart people would disagree.
Speaker 1: Vanevar Bush arguably knew more than anyone about the way
Speaker 1: scientific progress occurred. He guided science policy for the United
Speaker 1: States during the Second World War, coordinating the efforts of
Speaker 1: six thousand researchers. Bush said that great scientists should range
Speaker 1: widely and keep changing things up. In a speech to
Speaker 1: professors at MIT, Bush advocated breadth rather than depth. It
Speaker 1: is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon
Speaker 1: living in a modern monastic cell. Bush's idea was later
Speaker 1: backed up by scientific investigation of scientists themselves. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, a remarkable study was launched by a young
Speaker 1: psychologist named Bernice Agison. The study followed a group of
Speaker 1: promising researchers as their careers unfolded, periodically interviewing them and
Speaker 1: continuing even after Agison herself died in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Four of the scientists eventually won Nobel Prizes. The findings
Speaker 1: of the Agison study support Shannon's habit of flipping from
Speaker 1: one project to another. The scientists who'd most flourished over
Speaker 1: the decades, had switched back and forth dozens of times.
Speaker 1: Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere.
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton is most famous for formulating the law of gravity,
Speaker 1: but made huge advances in mathematics and optics. He was
Speaker 1: the master of the Royal Mint and was fascinated by economics,
Speaker 1: and devoted as much attention to alchemy as to anything else.
Speaker 1: Einstein published four astonishing scientific papers on four different topics,
Speaker 1: all in the same year nineteen oh five. Charles Darwin
Speaker 1: worked simultaneously on the theory of evolution. The definitive two
Speaker 1: volume work on barnacles and a book about the human infant,
Speaker 1: began while his son William was a baby, and published
Speaker 1: just in time for William Darwin's thirty eighth birthday. Multiple
Speaker 1: projects aren't unusual at the highest level of science. They're
Speaker 1: the norm. Not only that, high achieving scientists often have
Speaker 1: time consuming side interests, pursuing photography, fine art, or music
Speaker 1: at or near a professional level. Nobel Prize winning scientists
Speaker 1: are substantially more likely to have serious hobbies than other
Speaker 1: leading scientists, who in turn are more likely to have
Speaker 1: them than the rest of us. The later part of
Speaker 1: Shannon's career fits right into this highly diverse pattern, but
Speaker 1: then so does the early part. Back in nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: shortly after his first thunderbolt, he wrote a note to
Speaker 1: an academic mentor, dear doctor Bush, Yes Vanovar Bush, the
Speaker 1: man who knew everyone who mattered in mid century American science.
Speaker 1: Of course, he was there to support the young Claude Shannon.
Speaker 1: Dear doctor Bush, I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously,
Speaker 1: and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than
Speaker 1: sticking to one problem. When Shannon wrote to Vanovar Bush,
Speaker 1: he wasn't working on engineering or logic. He was working
Speaker 1: on genetics. He knew nothing about the subject, but swiftly
Speaker 1: produced a completely new kind of algebra to describe and
Speaker 1: analyze genetic inheritance. The work was intriguing and wholly original,
Speaker 1: but needed developing. Did Shannon develop it He did not.
Speaker 1: In fact, he never even bothered publishing it. Neither did
Speaker 1: he ever return to genetics. Later scholars lament the loss.
Speaker 1: His new algebra might really have advance on the field,
Speaker 1: but sticking with genetics might also have meant he never
Speaker 1: had his second thunderbolt on information theory. Between those two thunderbolts,
Speaker 1: Shannon didn't just switch fields. He lit a rich and
Speaker 1: complicated life. He married and then divorced within a year.
Speaker 1: He moved to Manhattan to spice things up. It played
Speaker 1: chess in Washington Square Park. It played clarinet. He loved
Speaker 1: the jazz scene in New York. He swam, played tennis,
Speaker 1: stayed up too late, and played his music too loud.
Speaker 1: All this was happening when Shannon was at the peak
Speaker 1: of his intellectual powers. Shannon didn't just hit thirty five
Speaker 1: then abandoned serious thinking in favor of playing around. Shannon
Speaker 1: was playing around all along. Maybe Shannon's love of frittering,
Speaker 1: I say, frittering away his time on juggling or unicycling,
Speaker 1: or music or chess. Maybe that's not the reason he
Speaker 1: produced only two truly brilliant ideas. Maybe it's the reason
Speaker 1: he produced two truly brilliant ideas in the first place.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will be back in a moment. I try
Speaker 1: hard to answer all the people who write to me.
Speaker 1: I get anxious knowing that the task is unfinished. Claude
Speaker 1: Shannon didn't feel that same compulsion to clear his inbox
Speaker 1: He often left correspondence unanswered, then eventually cleared the decks
Speaker 1: to the use of a trash can marked letters I've
Speaker 1: procrastinated on for too long. That might seem a trivial thing,
Speaker 1: but I think it points to something deeper. Psychologists have
Speaker 1: identified a tendency called completion bias. If you've ever assembled
Speaker 1: a list of things to do, then ticked off all
Speaker 1: the easy ones while ignoring the important stuff, you've demonstrated
Speaker 1: completion bias. That apparently admirable tendency persistence the determination to
Speaker 1: finish what we start well, it could be twisted and perverted.
Speaker 1: If we feel compelled to reach the finish line, we
Speaker 1: also feel tempted to choose a short racetrack. Is more
Speaker 1: at stake here than making ourselves feel better by cheating
Speaker 1: with our own to do lists. Psychologists recently studied completion
Speaker 1: by us in a high stake setting, a hospital emergency department.
Speaker 1: They found that the busier the emergency room becomes, the
Speaker 1: more the doctors look for quick wins the patients who
Speaker 1: aren't really very ill and can therefore be treated swiftly
Speaker 1: and ticked off the list, and this behavior is counterproductive.
Speaker 1: The more seriously ill patients wait longer, of course, and
Speaker 1: the doctors start to slow down after working through a
Speaker 1: lot of fairly trivial cases. I expect we all know
Speaker 1: the feeling, but in their subconscious desire to see some
Speaker 1: work through to completion, doctors were harming the patients who
Speaker 1: were in greatest need. Claude Shannon's willingness to set aside
Speaker 1: projects starts to look like a strength rather than a weakness.
Speaker 1: Shannon certainly could focus, whether building information theory from scratch
Speaker 1: or building a wearable computer to be Roulette. Yet Shannon
Speaker 1: also seemed to have an inner confidence that allowed him
Speaker 1: to declare victory at any point that suited him. If
Speaker 1: a piece of work was not good enough to publish, fine,
Speaker 1: he was happy to leave it unpublished. That juggling paper
Speaker 1: is an example, but so too was his early work
Speaker 1: on genetic algebra. One of Claude Shannon's colleagues at Bell
Speaker 1: Labs praised him as a man of infinite courage. He
Speaker 1: was talking about Shannon's intellectual daring, a willingness to march
Speaker 1: into unknown territory to begin the search for solutions to
Speaker 1: problems that seemed as unbeatable as Roulette. But perhaps Courage
Speaker 1: is not quite the right word to describe Shannon's approach.
Speaker 1: I prefer in soussiens Claude. Shannon just wasn't worried. He
Speaker 1: didn't feel completion by us the way you and I
Speaker 1: feel it. He would walk away from any project at
Speaker 1: any time without regret. And if he was willing to
Speaker 1: abandon a stalled project, where was the risk? And if
Speaker 1: there was little risk, why talk about courage. Shannon didn't
Speaker 1: need courage, He just needed the ability to move on.
Speaker 1: In August nineteen sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon met
Speaker 1: Ed and Vivian Thorpe in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Claude and Ed prepared the wearable computer system, which required
Speaker 1: both of them to operate. Shannon controlled the computer itself,
Speaker 1: the size of a cigarette packet, with twelve transistors in it.
Speaker 1: He used his toes to trigger silent mercury switches hidden
Speaker 1: in his shoes. Thorpe, whose research into blackjack had given
Speaker 1: him plenty of experience hanging around in casinos, was the
Speaker 1: one who would place the bets. He had a radio
Speaker 1: receiver and an ear piece connected to a hair thin
Speaker 1: steel wire. The ear piece played an ascending musical scale.
Speaker 1: Shannon would use the toe switches to time a rotation
Speaker 1: of the wheel, and then the counter rotation of the
Speaker 1: ball from the moment it passed a reference mark. Thorpe
Speaker 1: would hear the musical scale stop on a continuous note
Speaker 1: at the moment that Shannon finished timing the rotation, and
Speaker 1: the pitch of that continuous note would indicate in which
Speaker 1: part of the wheel the ball was likely to drop.
Speaker 1: Thorpe still had a few seconds to place bets and
Speaker 1: collect the money. Thorpe knew from hard experience that they
Speaker 1: had to be careful. Their device wasn't illegal, It was
Speaker 1: far too inconceivable for that, but it wouldn't go down
Speaker 1: well if discovered. Beating the casino required more than just
Speaker 1: beating the game. That's why the Shannons and the Thorpes
Speaker 1: stroll up to the table separately, pretending not to know
Speaker 1: each other. It's why Claude Shannon's scribbling numbers down, distracting
Speaker 1: the floor manager from what he's really doing. All the
Speaker 1: while he's gazing intently at the wheel from under his
Speaker 1: dark eyebrows and his toe silently pressing and releasing the
Speaker 1: hidden control of the computer. And while Thorpe is standing
Speaker 1: at the other end of the table, cheerfully placing his bets.
Speaker 1: The earpiece is receiving the signals from Shannon's little computer
Speaker 1: and giving Thorpe predictions in the form of musical tones,
Speaker 1: and Thorpe is winning. Not everything goes smoothly. The fine
Speaker 1: wires to Thorpe's ear piece break several times, requiring a
Speaker 1: trip to the bathroom to fix them. At one moment,
Speaker 1: a horrified observer sees the earpiece come loose and think
Speaker 1: some strange insect is crawling out of Thorpe's ear. But
Speaker 1: fundamentally the computer works perfectly. The chips are stacking up fast.
Speaker 1: At the end of the visit to Vegas, the Shannons
Speaker 1: and the Thorpes pondered their options ed. Thorpe was bullish.
Speaker 1: He'd beaten the casinos before and was happy to do
Speaker 1: it again, but Betty Claude and Vivian weren't so sure.
Speaker 1: It had been an exhilarating day, but a nerve wracking one,
Speaker 1: and casino's simply banned players who seemed to win too
Speaker 1: much for any reason, so making the computer pay on
Speaker 1: a regular basis would require constantly concealing their identities. Thorpe
Speaker 1: was forced to admit they had a point. The computer
Speaker 1: clearly worked, and in theory they could use it to
Speaker 1: make millions, but was it worth the effort and the risk.
Speaker 1: Shannon and Thorpe had had their fun, and they had
Speaker 1: proved their point to their own satisfaction, and Claude Shannon
Speaker 1: had other projects to play with. So after months of
Speaker 1: hard work, the world's first wearable computer was retired undefeated,
Speaker 1: after a single trip to Vegas. Decades later, Thorpe reflected,
Speaker 1: I have always thought it was a good decision. When
Speaker 1: I first thought about writing this cautionary tale, I thought
Speaker 1: it would be a warning not to lose focus like
Speaker 1: Shannon did. I've changed my mind now I think Shannon
Speaker 1: and Thorpe are inspirational figures. The cautionary tale isn't a
Speaker 1: warning to keep your focus. Instead, it's a warning not
Speaker 1: to focus too much. Don't commit yourself so totally to
Speaker 1: a project that you lose heart, or lose sight of
Speaker 1: creative idea, or lose your freedom to change course. There's
Speaker 1: one last lesson I think we can draw from Claude
Speaker 1: Shannon's ability to move on in their Vegas hotel room
Speaker 1: as Shannon equipped Thorpe with his earpiece and the fine
Speaker 1: connecting wires. Shannon had cocked his head to one side
Speaker 1: and smiled impishly. What makes you tick? It was a
Speaker 1: joke about the fact that Thorpe was plugged into a machine,
Speaker 1: but young Thorpe took it as a deep question from
Speaker 1: an older and wiser man. What did make him tick?
Speaker 1: Professional gambling, academic mathematics or something else? But then why choose?
Speaker 1: Shannon seemed to do it all, from academia to juggling,
Speaker 1: and so in the end would ed Thorpe. You can
Speaker 1: find interviews with him well into his eighties, still as
Speaker 1: sharp as anything, reminiscing about blackjack and academic mathematics and
Speaker 1: the hundreds of millions of dollars he eventually made after
Speaker 1: analyzing the patterns in financial markets as one of the
Speaker 1: first quants. One of the intriguing ideas in Claude Shannon's
Speaker 1: mathematical theory of communication is that a message can be
Speaker 1: compressed to the precise extent that it is predictable. A
Speaker 1: movie can be compressed because each frame tends to resemble
Speaker 1: the previous one. A compression algorithm doesn't store the new frame. Instead,
Speaker 1: it stores a series of difts changes from the previous frame.
Speaker 1: Movies with lots of cuts or fast dramatic movements are
Speaker 1: harder to compress. The same is true more or less
Speaker 1: with the way we remember our lives. Although the brain
Speaker 1: is not a video recorder and doesn't store difts, it
Speaker 1: does compress memories by recalling the gist of an experience.
Speaker 1: If I get up in the morning at the usual time,
Speaker 1: eat my regular breakfast, walk the usual route to the station,
Speaker 1: and catch the same trainers always to the office, my
Speaker 1: brain doesn't trouble itself to remember much. The diffs aren't
Speaker 1: worth bothering with. A life that's too predictable creates few memories.
Speaker 1: That's what prisoners sometimes say about their years behind bars.
Speaker 1: Don't remember much because it was all the same or
Speaker 1: the pandemic lockdown For me and perhaps for you, involved
Speaker 1: sitting in the same seat doing the same thing every day.
Speaker 1: Life in lockdown was thin and forgettable. The opposite experience
Speaker 1: is a vivid vacation somewhere, packed with new sights and smells,
Speaker 1: the people, the language, the architecture, the food. These complex,
Speaker 1: rich experiences defy compression. The diffs are too big, so
Speaker 1: the memories are rich. Has it really only been ten
Speaker 1: hours since I arrived you ask yourself? Feels like a week.
Speaker 1: So if you want a full life rich with memories,
Speaker 1: keep searching for new experiences like Shannon, don't be afraid
Speaker 1: to declare victory and start afresh. Shannon did everything, the
Speaker 1: jazz and the juggling and the chess, the intellectual journey
Speaker 1: from genetics to the Rubik's cube, the joky robots and
Speaker 1: the flame throwing trumpet, and he really did turn upside
Speaker 1: down the way the world thought about digital information. Not once,
Speaker 1: but twice. Isn't twice enough. The key sources for this
Speaker 1: episode were Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman's biography of Claude Shannon,
Speaker 1: A Mind at Play and Edward Thorpe's autobiography A Man
Speaker 1: for All Markets. For a full list of references, see
Speaker 1: Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly and
Speaker 1: Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the
Speaker 1: work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring
Speaker 1: in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter
Speaker 1: and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gohan, Melanie Gutteridge,
Speaker 1: Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner, Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Massa Munroe, and
Speaker 1: Rufus Wright. The show would not have been possible without
Speaker 1: the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnaz,
Speaker 1: Carli mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Daniella La Khan,
Speaker 1: and Maya Kanning. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
Speaker 1: and review
Speaker 3: Pttlyttics