This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

It's not just gamblers using science. In many cases, science has benefited enormously from people studying the house.

Matheacharski he's the author of the new book The Perfect Bet how science and math

are taking the luck out of gambling. Back in a renaissance actually, probability theory was developed to study these games.

I mean, can you imagine having bets where it's not actually clear what a fair game is?

For example, in the 17th century, the question came up, do you have the same chance of throwing a six by rolling one dye four times, or of throwing two sixes by rolling two dice 24 times.

That had been around a while those kind of bets

and those kind of questions.

And that was Fermaton and Pascal

who developed a lot of this theory.

And one of the crucial things was this concept of an expected value.

You know if you play a game repeatedly what do you expect to win on average and

until you have that kind of theory in place it's very hard to actually compare two bets directly and

work out which one is more preferable. Pascal figured out that your chances of

throwing one six in four rolls of a dye was slightly more than 50 percent but your odds of two

sixes in 24 throws of two dice was slightly less than 50 percent.

And not this theory from probability statistics,

and actually more recently things like game theory and chaos theory

originated with studying games of chance.

I think science actually has benefited a lot from people's curiosity about gambling.

My full interview with Adam Kucharski about his book The Perfect Bet is at our website as a science

talk podcast.

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