AI at the casino
Casinos up the ante in the battle against card counters - with an application that tracks cards and bets at the table, looking for anomalies:
MindPlay works by placing a set of 14 digital cameras around a specially built blackjack table tray. The optical equipment registers every card in play by reading special invisible ink printed on them.
But that isn't the only trick up MindPlay's sleeve. It can recognize the differences between a player's drink, a napkin, an ashtray, a stack of chips being held by a player and a pile of chips in play, Soltys said. And it tracks the location and value of chips by comparing 3-D models of them in a database to all objects on the table.
It will be interesting to see where that will go.
Comments
Casinos are watching you
[Dutch guy speaking English] August 18, 2003 10:30:05.586
Trackback from Dutch guy speaking English
Casinos are watching you
SmalltalkBlogGuy reports on AI at the Casino. If anything, this tells us that casinos are making way too much money on blackjack tables. I don't know any other businesses that have the money to put up 14 cameras (at every......
gamber alert
[not a gambler] August 18, 2003 22:01:00.765
It says the cameras and read the "invisible ink" on the cards... Can you say "Marked Cards"? The ink is probablly visible in near infrared, easily detected by CCD-based cameras... all the card player needs is an adapted microcamera hidden in the button of his jacket... with a display in his glasses or his watch. Don't forget that all those slot machines are paying for most of what you see at the casino.
Whatever
[Alan Daniels] August 21, 2003 16:56:07.984
It would be interesting to see what the Gaming Commissions of the various states would say about this. Were I a Commissioner, I'd nix all of this before it even started. I mean, if the Casinos have access to this information, doing something that they players themselves aren't allowed to do,wouldn't it be considered to be rigging the game? A card with invisible ink on it is a marked card, which if used by a player, would result in an arrest. This is why I've never, EVER bothered playing Blackjack, btw; you bother to use any intelligence, they accuse you of "cheating" and toss you out of the Casino.
Untitled
[] September 25, 2003 17:25:58.943
I highly doubt that the invisible ink is on the face down side of the card. The ink is most likely on the face up side, which would provide no advantage for the player even if he could read the mark. The casino is not allowed to read cards that are not in play yet.