ANTIC Interview 460 - Tim Jenkins, Cheating at Roulette

Tim Jenkins, Cheating at Roulette with an Atari Computer Tim Jenkins is the author of several humorous memoirs: "Missions Accomplished: And some funny business along the way", "More Missions Accomplished: And a lot more funny business", and "Business Missions Accomplished: Silly travel tales on the corporate dime". I wanted to talk to Tim about one chapter in his 2018 book More Missions Accomplished: the chapter is titled "Gaming the System" and it tells the tale of him trying to cheat a roulette using his Atari 800 computer. A brief excerpt from that chapter: "Las Vegas — 1989. Shortly after the dawn of the personal computer revolution, opportunity beckoned. Some people wrote software and sold it over retail counters. Others launched services that harnessed the databasing and processing power of the PC to help people find a job, a date, or other people with the same interests. I put my own Atari 800 computer to work simulating roulette. ... If you kept increasing your bet every time you lost a spin of the wheel, eventually your number would come up: The question was, would you earn back all the money you'd previously lost and make a profit? Yes. That is, you would if you did not first run into the table limit. ...  How to get there without hitting the max bet? That's what I set out to simulate on my Atari computer. ... The program showed this to be a winning strategy, if perfectly executed." This interview took place on May 22, 2025. More Missions Accomplished at amazon: https://amzn.to/446MrVP At Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/moremissionsacco0000timj/page/138/mode/2up Video version of this interview: https://youtu.be/EW-pDXlBDQg