The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Gambling

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robert Entz.

And this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide to...

And today it is an Infinite Monkey's Guide to Gambling.

But more specifically, the science of gambling.

The science of.

Is there a science?

Well, I suppose that's what we're going to find out, really.

But that idea that you could scientifically, because then eventually, surely all gamblers would buy that book and then the house would always lose.

And that would be the end of gambling.

The gambling industry is, of course, much like the alcohol industry.

They say drink responsibly and gamble carefully.

I'm not entirely sure that is what they really mean.

Yeah.

Gambling looks like a game of chance.

But is there really a way to maximise the chance?

Or will the house always win?

You'd be good at poker.

Why?

Because you'd have that smiling face, the smiling face of an assassin.

And they would never know were you smiling because you had a great hand or not.

Well, if anybody's going to know whether I'd make a good poker player, it's Richard Wiseman.

He's a psychologist, but he's also someone who can make cards appear and disappear because he's a conjurer as well.

And that's a killer combination.

He talked with writer Helen Zoltzmann about the importance of trying to have fun combined with the importance of winning.

What I find amazing psychologically is people are so happy when they've won, they kind of go, Oh yes, look at me, like I've won.

I've got and you think, hold on a second, a lot of this had to do with the roll of the dice, which is chance, or the way we shuffle cards, whatever the game is, chance.

You won because of a chance event, but instead of putting anything out there like that, you kind of go, Look at me, I won.

Disgusting.

Well, but isn't that I was I was thinking about the I was thinking about you know a lot of people say this about the stock market.

There's very famous I don't know if it's true, maybe someone can comment, but there's this famous analysis that said you could throw darts at the FTSE 100 and just invest in that, and you would do statistically as well over time as someone who thinks that they're reading patterns in the future.

Oh, we did an experiment yesterday.

But that's a character type, isn't it?

Yes, that's right.

We did an experiment years ago where we had three.

We had a professional investor, we had a financial astrologer that looked at when companies were formed, and on the basis of that, predicted when to invest in them.

Put it for the radio listeners, that was a very surprised look that he gave us.

And a five-year-old child.

And we gave them all £5,000 £5,000 to invest, and then we tracked them, I think, for 10 days.

And the kid outperformed the other two.

And we said to the astrologer,

Are you surprised at the outcome?

And she said, No, because the child is Pisces and they're traditionally very lucky.

Helen, is our games, do you think, in the end, the actual, the agony for the loser, the frequent frustration, again, as we're saying, this will be going out a few weeks after Christmas, where, you know, family

over pies in trivial pursuit, over clued a mastermind, whatever it might be.

That actually, for the benefit of the limited joy of the victor compared to the agony of the losers, says a great deal about humans.

Well, in games like Monopoly, my tactic is usually get into jail as soon as possible, sit out the rest of the game in there, because it is not fun.

That is a game that rewards people that are very into admin and buying a lot of houses and ruining everyone else's lives.

And that is too close to reality.

No, I think that in terms of game playing, I think Helen's exactly right.

It should be as much fun as possible.

For me, as a psychologist, it's about bonding.

I mean, you don't want to sit around at Christmas or whenever and just alienate everyone else around the table as you go, Yes, I won.

You think, well, what kind of achievement is that?

You know, so

these should be about having fun.

That just seems to me the key thing.

And my mathematician colleagues, much as I respect them, have taken away a lot of that fun

for me.

Is the secret of gambling understanding psychology or is it the mathematics?

Because if it's mathematics.

Is it?

So if I deal out two hands of cards, at what point of shuffling and dealing and shuffling and dealing do you think there could possibly begin to be a mathematical model that was worth following?

If you know about probability, then you can tip the odds in your favour.

Right.

That's the point.

But only tip the odds in your favour.

You can never definitely be sure that you're going to have a winning hand.

That you're psychology.

You should do do poker honestly no no no really i think it's going to work for you anyway we wanted to work out was it mathematics is it psychology how much it's both of those things so we gathered together a unique panel of mathematicians insomuch as one of them is the only mathematician that i know to have pretended to be pele for money In fact, when I say the only mathematician I know who's pretend to be Pele, he's the only mathematician I know who's pretended to be any footballer.

Or the only person you know who's pretended to be Pele.

Well, here is Pele's autobiographer, Alex Belos, with mathematician Hannah Fry, psychologist Richard Wiseman, and Helen Zaltzmann on a classic conundrum.

So there's a traveller with his wolf, his goat, and his bunch of cabbages, and he gets to a river.

He's got to get to the other side, fantastic.

And then he sees there's a boat there, but the boat only has space for himself and one of those items.

He cannot leave the goat with the cabbages because the goat will eat the cabbages, and he cannot leave the wolf with the goat because the wolf will eat the goat.

How does he do it?

And this is a puzzle which was first written down in the eighth century and I would say is probably the most viral in the sense that it's probably spread to more people in the history of civilization than anyone else.

But by the 13th century there's a text that says that every five-year-old in the world can solve this problem, this puzzle.

Richard, is logic, logical thinking

difficult for human beings?

Is it sort of

an alien response to the world?

Something that has to be learnt.

I think it is.

I mean, I don't think it comes naturally to us.

I mean, in this instance, you think, as a psychologist, a man arrives with a wolf, a goat, and some cabbages.

I'd be thinking, what's going on?

I wouldn't be thinking, how's he getting those across?

What kind of man is this?

He's been travelling with a wolf and a goat and some cabbages.

Yeah, but he might have been travelling with his wife originally, and then he kind of screwed up the going across the river.

The first one went, the wolf's eaten my wife.

So it could be that it was a much bigger group initially, and this is what he's left with after he got left the wolf there again.

So,

I think that's a more interesting scenario.

I can't like to explore that as a psychologist.

They've all eaten each other before they got to the river, anyway.

Now we're getting somewhere.

So, I think sometimes the difference perhaps between psychologists and mathematicians is a psychologist eventually makes up the answer, and mathematicians are determined to get it right.

Unbelievable.

He's got a wolf, he's got a goat, he's got some cabbages, and no one's asking the why question.

That's all.

It's It's kind of a cliché that mathematics almost should be, I'm going to say should be useless, but you know what I mean, in a very powerful sense.

There's certainly pure mathematicians.

There doesn't have to be a contact with the real world in terms of usefulness, although, as you've said time and again, these puzzles lead to useful mathematics.

I mean,

is that a fair characterization?

I think so.

I mean, traditionally, maths is divided into kind of pure math, which is that totally pointless, just playing around with shapes and patterns, and the applied maths, which is trying to solve problems.

I mean, I'm not a professional mathematician, but

from what professional mathematicians tell me, that the reasons why they do it and they carry on doing it is that there is always that kind of

childlike playfulness that the subject always contains.

Yeah,

I think math is sort of the ultimate playground, really, the ultimate logical playground.

Is there a character type, Richard, that goes into mathematics?

Where would you even come across a wolf?

Just leave it.

It could be a wild boar.

A wild boar's not going to eat a goat.

That's a mind.

It totally changes the

vicious wild boar.

It's not going to eat a goat.

A crocodile.

A crocodile.

It's all like it to eat the man, isn't it?

Well, no, no, you're making it worse.

So you're saying it's ridiculous he's got a wolf.

Why don't they?

They should have just travelled separately and this would be funny.

We had a lot of feedback to that episode.

And it's probably, I would say, one of the most furious rows that Brian and I have had.

Certainly one of the most furious rows we've had about a wolf and a cabbage.

And I think in the end, we decided the best thing to do was just build a bigger boat.

Anyway, the idea of gambling led us to thinking about probability and the notion that many of us completely misunderstand how it works.

By many of us, again, I'll say I do not understand, but Brian probably does.

For 17% of us.

That's nearly a quarter, isn't it?

Yeah.

Anyway, when Tim Minchin wants to understand something, he writes a song about it.

And then we all learn to with a rhyme scheme.

You should do more of that, Brian, because you know how to do the ivories and everything, don't you?

Well, I could just write a limerick about an event horizon.

I think a limerick about an event horizon.

There once was a black hole from Shropshire.

Oh, you've gone with Shropshire.

You're already in a rhyming dictionary quandary at that point as well.

This is worse than the wolf cabbage debacle.

Do something about the curvature of space-time instead.

I'm sure we get away with that.

Here are Tim Minchin and Alex Bellos talking and singing singing about randomness.

You know, I've got a song called If I Didn't Have You, which is about love and the notion of fate and soulmates and stuff.

So that's got lyrics in it, like

your love is one in a million, you couldn't buy it at any price.

But of the 9.99900,000 other possible loves, statistically, some of them would be equally nice.

And it also says,

I think you're special, but you fall within a bell curve.

So, you know,

there's,

yeah, quite often I find myself saying, what are the odds in my shows to make the point that they're reasonable.

They're generally generally the answer to that question is like you're uh one over twenty-seven to the power of twenty-one or whatever that you you can find them eventually.

Have you ever written a song of thought this is a great song, but it's actually statistically inaccurate and therefore because that's the thing is you are involved in you write about rationalism you write about science you write about so you actually go that this is I've got a problem.

I can I can correctly rhyme this, but this will make it inaccurate or yeah th th there's there's two things.

One, I I do have an obsession with making my songs thorough, which is why they're usually about two minutes longer than is fun.

And the other thing is I try to keep myself

sort of just stupid enough so that I can justify being stupid.

Which isn't to say I need to work very hard to keep myself that stupid.

I just mean I try to make it apparent that I'm not actually claiming to know anything.

When you talk about working out probability and when you talk about decisions that you can make and rational decisions, could you, for instance, Tim live your life by going, hang on a minute, right, I'm just going to work out what is the probability that if I take that action that will lead to that and that's the required moment or does it in turn, does it become a mathematical exercise in living?

I think I do live my life like that.

It's in my nature to try to shed any superstition from any decisions.

I actually consciously work on making sure I've got no superstition left.

The thing I always try to do if a loved one's getting on a plane is say, I hope you have a crash.

You know

just because I like taking control of what is a very difficult instinct.

The toughest superstition I've got that I've had to try to rid myself of is the touch wood superstition.

The idea that I go, I've never had a car crash.

You know, as if your words can change the universe, but it's so embedded in us that we think we're special.

We basically think we're special.

I think it's totally fine to have these little superstitions to make people feel better, to be able to fly easier.

It's just when, you know, you lose all your money because you go gambling, it becomes a problem.

And, you know, misunderstanding of probability means that people can be conned really easily, and lots of people are conned.

Now, there's nothing nothing I enjoy more than a disagreement on Monkey Cage.

A scientific row, because they always lead to the best insults.

We find ourselves in worlds of spherical idiots.

I love spherical idiots.

Yeah, my favourite one was Rutherford, who said, some officious official at the university, he said, you are like a Euclidean point.

You have position, but no magnitude.

That's brilliant.

That is.

What's lovely about some of the insults from scientists is non-scientists don't even realise they've been insulted.

You Euclidean points!

Yeah, so everyone's happy.

You've got your revenge, and no one's actually necessarily felt the dagger because they didn't understand what the dagger was.

So Howley, as well, wasn't there?

Yeah.

So your ideas are so ill-founded that you're not even wrong.

Yeah, that's such a great thing.

An answer so bad it even fails on being wrong.

It's in an entirely new universe of wrongdude.

Anyway, here is a disagreement about coincidence between Tim Minchin, Brian, and Alex Belos.

Let's see how this fight plays out.

Our natural sense of coincidence and probability can mislead us.

And you tell the story of the woman who won the lottery in New Jersey twice in four weeks?

Yeah, in four months, I think it was.

So, two lottery wins in four months.

Yeah.

And the newspaper.

The newspaper said this was a one in 17 trillion chance of that happening.

And it was a one in trillion chance of any person going and buying one ticket on that day and then going and buying the other ticket.

But that's not the way probability works.

If there are thousands or millions of people actually buying lottery tickets, it turned out mathematicians did the math on it, so to speak.

And the chance of any one person winning two lotteries in America in any four-month period is about 25%.

I don't have a problem with that lotto example.

The lay idiots way I think of that is that there's very, very low possibility of thing A happening, but there's loads and loads and loads of things.

Therefore, the probability of anything happening is really, really good.

In fact, given enough time and enough things, the probability of anything happening is always one.

So

any event you can think of will eventually happen, like the existence of human life and all that sort of stuff.

But where that's not true, that if it violates the laws of physics.

Bring me out all these laws of physics theories like they really are.

Why?

Why, if time is infinite, theoretically, it's not.

But

if it it was infinite.

So you have a law such as the conservation of electric charge, which is based on some.

I don't have that law.

So you can't make a negative charge without a positive charge, which is the way we think the universe works at the moment.

So that's why you can only create matter and antimatter in equal amounts, because if you're going to make some matter with a positive charge, you need to make an equal amount with a negative charge.

So that would be an absolute law.

Then, no matter how long you waste it.

Yeah, sorry.

No, you're absolutely right.

A physically impossible thing won't happen if it's physically impossible.

If there's a possibility that it's not impossible, then that will happen.

But I guess what I'm saying is all possible events will happen over enough time.

Yeah, yeah.

Precision.

Bloody businesses, can we back on?

Can we get back from that?

This is radio 4.

It's about precision.

The listeners won't know this, but when Brian was explaining antimatter and matter, he was using it both with his fists.

As if locked stock and two smoking barrels had been made by the Open University.

You would have been a character in it.

We've got matter over here, antimatter over here, and someone I think is about to go from matter to antimatter.

Thank you, Tim.

I am a physicist.

You are a minstrel.

We can move on.

So how easy is a poker face?

Really easy.

You just have to have no internal monologue.

That was really impressive as well because when you told me the poker face was really easy, you did it with such a stillness.

that I believe that you really do know how easy a poker face is, but I can't be certain whether actually you have no idea.

Always inscrutable, Brian Cox.

So, to help us learn to lie more effectively, cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott explained to newspaper columnist David Aranovich and Richard Wiseman how we're all natural liars.

Are there other animals that exhibit deceptive behaviour?

There are examples.

I think sometimes because you're reliant on human observers telling you about these, sometimes these are humans being a little bit romantic about animals, like look at that cheeky little sparrow.

She wants to mate with that other sparrow.

They've gone hiding.

Oh, yes, they're up to something.

So, you know, that's possible that it might just be some sparrows mating.

I mean, building deception into that.

But there's a theory, quite an interesting theory, about primates that says part of what's driven the evolution of very large brains in primates is the sort of social processing you need to do to lie and to deceive.

So, if you look broadly across primates, you can see primates with smaller brains tend to deceive each other by kind of I wanted your water, I'm trying to think of a good way of doing it.

I might sort of scream, you look why I'm screaming, then I nick your water.

So it's kind of quite basic deception.

That as you move up larger brains, basically, you find more complex patterns of deception.

And when you get to chimpanzees, it really starts to look pretty human, actually.

So you're suggesting that to operate in large social groups, deception is a necessary behaviour.

Well, potentially, particularly for the sort of large social groups that primates live in, which are very hierarchical.

They're not, whatever Russell Brand tells you, they're not large cooperative groups of monkeys who are all sharing

does that mean that the highest form of evolution we've achieved so far is Geoffrey Archer.

Yes, it's also related to the question of what age do we start to lie as humans.

And there's some lovely studies where you bring kids into the lab and you put them in a room and you say, Okay, we're setting up your favourite toy behind you, but don't look.

And then you walk out of the room and say, Whatever you do, don't look at the toy.

And then you watch them with closed-circuit TV.

And after a couple of minutes, they'll look at the toy and then they'll go to go back again.

And then you come back into the room and ask the key question: you say, Did you look at the toy?

So you find out whether or not they're prepared to lie.

You do that with three-year-olds, so they've only just really mastered language.

Already, 50% of them will lie about looking at the toy.

You go up two years to five-year-olds, and I kid you not, this is the results.

There isn't a single five-year-old that will tell the truth.

So that's why you must never trust your children under any circumstances.

In the next episode, Why Being Wrong is Sometimes Right, in the Infinite Monkey's Guide to

Failure.

All the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds, and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show.

In the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Till now, nice again.

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