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Both of them are wonderful scientists, the former students of the famous MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who always shared the passion to blackjack and roulette. In 1961 Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon made the attempt to create a special device to predict the winning numbers of roulette wheel; as far as we know, they were successful with it though the information about how much money they won with the help of that device is still unknown.
Who are Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon? What had they done to become respectful and famous not only in the gambling world but other fields too?
The father of blackjack card counting technique and a person who had found the way how to beat a dealer of blackjack; the mathematician and physicist; the teacher of MIT and UCLA; the author of many books on the topic of gambling (including the bestseller Beat the Dealer), astrology, mathematics and physics; the author of many articles and scientific works - this is the short list of Edward Thorp's achievements.
He had changed the history of gambling forever: after his book had been published, casinos began to change the rules of blackjack but it was in vain.
Edward Thorp met Claude Shannon at the beginning of his career and they became good friends and partners: every weekend they went to Las Vegas in order to play their favorite blackjack and roulette and check their luck. The idea to create the first advantage-play computer for winning roulette was born there.
This person is known being "the father of information theory" which he had proved in 1948; Claude Shannon was a great electronic engineer and mathematician who even got Alfred Noble Prize in 1939; he is the author of a huge amount of scientific works on the topic of mathematics, and he has a right to boast with a lot of different inventions some of which were crazy a bit:
Shannon and Thorp were not just good friends but also partners: a lot of thorp's theories were proved by Shannon and vice versa; later they applied the Kelly criterion to the stock market and received wonderful results.
Claude Elwood Shannon died in 2001 (the 24th of February).