Thanks for the requests yesterday! Without further ado, here’s a slideshow of the numbers you asked for, along with a little context about each photo. Feel free to ask for more if you like – if there’s enough interest, I can make it my official monday feature. Of course, there’s no guarantee the content will actually be good…
As for the results: Image #1 was a jackpot, with 3 different shots, while 1991 and 42 had 2 each, 976 had one and 7777 buzzed out. As a consolation prize for Will, I’ve thrown in the closest number that existed (7772, from a particularly difficult macro session which involved lots of photo deletion!). Oh, and you can pause the slideshow on any image using the middle button if you want to read the caption.
Enjoy, and keep the requests coming! Who knows, you might turn up some gold…
42 never disappoints.
Well duh! The secret now is to find the magic numbers which reside in my ‘keepers’ folder.
Whenever I think of roulette and ‘beating the odds’, the story of Thorp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp) and Shannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon) comes to mind. Two mathematicians who, applied chaos theory to predict the outcome of a roulette wheel (whether it lands on red or black). To top it off they invented a microcomputer (keep in mind that this was in 1961) to be cast inside a shoe that would be able to perform the the calculations to predict the outcome (with some error of course, but the odds were improved).
I think since then there have been many versions of the story told and retold, including a number of spin-offs such as this article I dug up; http://www.casino-roulette-systems.com/shoe-roulette-system.htm … not too sure about the validity of the article given the fact that it cites Doyne Farmer
as the original creator of the computer and doesn’t mention Norman Packard or ‘The Eudaemons’…
Oh well, I guess it’s an interesting insight in to how awesome maths, physics and computer science actually is.