May 14, 2021 • 36 mins
Claude Shannon was brilliant. He was the Einstein of computer science... only he loved "fritterin' away" his time building machines to play chess, solve Rubik's cubes and beat the house at roulette.
If Shannon had worked more diligently - instead of juggling, riding a unicycle and abandoning project after project - would he have made an even greater contribution to human knowledge? Maybe... and maybe not. Are restlessness and "fritterin'" important parts of a rich and creative life?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It would be hard to think of a better
example of a game of chance than roulette. Beneath the
romantic French terminology and the myriad rules of etiquette, each
(00:37):
spin of the roulette wheel is utterly random. The casino's
advantage is small that it cannot be overcome. The game
is remorseless over the long haul. The only way to
win is not to play, or is it? One day
in August nineteen sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon stroll
(01:01):
up to a roulette table in Las Vegas, pretending not
to know their companions, Ed and Vivian Thorpe. Claude and
the ladies a nerve us, but they don't show it.
Ed Thorpe isn't nervous, he's excited. He's still in his twenties,
but he's an old hand in the casinos. Claude Shannon
stands right by the wheel. He's forty five years old,
(01:23):
slim and good looking, with fine cheekbones and dark eyebrows.
He's misdirecting the attention of the floor manager by scribbling
down numbers. He looks like he's got some crazy system
that will inevitably bankrupt him. Thorpe is at the other
end of the table, far from the wheel and far
from Shannon. He has dark hair, a round face, and
(01:45):
a smile. He's having fun placing his bets with the
confidence of a man who knows the unbeatable game is
about to be beaten. This is a defining moment in
a project that has been quietly ticking over for a year.
When it began, Thorpe and Shannon didn't know each other.
Edward O'thorpe was a junior mathematics instructor at MIT. Claude
(02:10):
Shannon was the greatest computer scientist in the world. Ed
Thorpe had a plan to beat Roulette, and he needed
Shannon to help him. Systems to beat Roulette are like
blueprints for perpetual motion machines or formulas to turn lead
into gold. They're absurd, the pseudo scientific obsessions of Cranks
(02:32):
and Claude. Shannon's secretary had already warned Thorpe that Professor
Shannon doesn't spend time on topics or people that don't
interest him. Shannon was a legendary figure. People in his
field talked about Shannon the way physicists talk about Albert Einstein.
What ed Thorpe was doing was much like buttonholing Einstein
(02:53):
and saying, Hey, Albert, I've got a sure fire scheme
for beating the bookies at the racetrack. An unknown young mathematician,
a patently futile goal, Claude Shannon, the computing legend, didn't hesitate.
Take a seat. He said to Ed Thorpe. We have
a lot to talk about. I'm Tim Harford. You're listening
(03:19):
to cautionary tales. Repeat. Please please some floora for the present.
(03:46):
How do you receive? Send floa? Please see if you
can read this? Can you read this? Yes? How are signals?
Do you receive? Please send something? Please send bes and bees?
How our signals? Those messages from eighteen fifty eight represent
a full day of attempted conversation via Morse code who
(04:09):
were cable lying three miles under the surface of the
Atlantic Ocean. The cable had been enormously expensive, and, as
he might guess, it wasn't really working. In an attempt
to boost the signal, the project's engineer, a man called
Wildman white House, cranked up the voltage. The cable melted.
(04:32):
It had survived only twenty eight days. Over the years,
telegraph engineers figured out how to work around the problem
of noise on the line. They built stronger cables with
better insulation and more sensitive detectures at the far end.
But nobody fully solved the problem of noise. Nobody even
fully understood it. Not until nearly a century later, along
(04:57):
came Clawed Shannon. Shannon's career was defined by two thunderbolts
of insight. When he was twenty one in nineteen thirty eight,
his master's thesis showed that any logical statement could be
evaluated by a machine, with true or false being represented
by switches being open or closed. Those dots and dashes
(05:19):
of Morse code were just a hint at the possibilities.
Armed only with open or closed on or off dot
or dash zero or one, machines could perform any operation
in mathematics or logic, And rather than merely proving the
point in abstract, Shannon, who was barely old enough to
(05:40):
buy a beer, showed electrical engineers how to efficiently build
a logic machine. Claude Shannon had bridged the vast gap
between electrical wiring diagrams and thought itself unlocking the age
of the digital computer. Shannon's second thunderbolt was published in
(06:03):
nineteen forty eight, when he was working at Bell Lamps
alongside several future Nobel prizewinners, including the team that invented
the transistor, Shannon returned to the deep problem underlying the
Transatlantic cable fiasco. He created a unified mathematical theory of
transmitting information. Some of that theory seems obvious from the
(06:26):
viewpoint of the twenty first century. We now take it
for granted that information bits and bytes and gigabytes might
represent anything a computer game or a spreadsheet, or music
or pornography. But that idea started with Shannon. Before him,
researchers only dimly grasped the distinction between the meaning of
(06:49):
a message and the quantity of information it contained. The
idea of compressing a file so that it took up
less space were Shannon's, and so too was the utterly
radical idea that any amount of noise on a line
could be overcome. We didn't do that by cranking up
the voltage and melting the undersea cable, nor did you
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need to build a better listening device or a thicker cable.
No matter how much distortion there was, you could convey
any message if you had enough patience. All you had
to do was add redundancy to the data. It's the
inverse of compressing a file. You add extra data to
make the message more likely to be recoverable. Even in
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the presence of interference, that idea was unthinkable, right up
to the point that Claude Shannon improved how to do it.
This new theory of information was revolutionary and so elegant
and general that it could be applied to anything from
the Internet to genetic information in DNA, even though the
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Internet did not then exist and the double helix structure
of DNA had not yet been discovered. Shannon wasn't merely
ahead of his time. He was the one who had
wound the clock and set it running. All this and
he'd barely turned thirty. So what did Shannon do for
an encore? Is a description from his biographers, Jimmy Sony
(08:21):
and Rob Goodman of Shannon's work ethic. Shannon arrived late,
if at all, and often spend the day absorbed in
games of chess and hecks in the common areas. When
not besting his colleagues at board games, he would be
found piloting a unicycle through Bell Labs's narrow passageways Occasionally
while juggling. Sometimes he would po go stick his way
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around the Bell Labs campus, much to the consternation reimagine
of the people who signed his paychecks. Shannon wasn't goofing
off completely. He often worked hard, but the projects he
worked tom seemed whimsical. For example, he spent many hours
at home playing with a colossal erector set. He built
(09:04):
a robot mouse that could explore a maze and by
trial and error on the first attempt, learn how to
reach its target flawlessly on the second run. The robot
mouse was clever and thought provoking, and it might have
represented real progress towards artificial intelligence if Shannon had persisted
with it. But he didn't. Shannon built perhaps the first
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chess playing computer, albeit one that could play only a
radically simplified setup the end game with six pieces. He
published a theoretical paper on computer chess. It could have
been the start of something, but again he lost interest.
It seemed a shame. If anyone could make progress with
computer chess, surely it was Shannon. He was good. Shannon
(09:53):
once traveled to Moscow and played chess with three time
world champion Mikhael Botvinick, and he made Botfinick sweat. When
it wasn't chess, it was juggling. Shannon tried to figure
out how to juggle upside down by hanging from the
ceiling and bouncing the balls off the floor. He built
juggling robots too, and a variety of machines designed to
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play abstract games, such as hex and a Rubic's Cube
solving robot, and the Jugglometer and a flame throwing trumpet
and the Ultimate Machine. The Ultimate Machine is a box
with a switch and a trapdoor, and you flick the
switch to turn it on. A robot finger pops out
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of the trapdoor and flips the switch back again to
turn itself off. Shannon made giant styrofoam shoes so he
could walk on water at a nearby lake. After Shannon
learned to juggle, ride a unicycle and walk a tight rope,
he formulated the aim of juggling on a unicycle on
a tight rope alas he never got further than two
(10:58):
out of three. Claude Shannon's boss, Henry Pollock, said, Shannon
has earned the right to be nonproductive, and of course
he had, but come on, you're a genius. Claude, You're
thirty three years old. You're the Einstein of computer science,
(11:21):
and you're unicycling, poe going and playing board games. Shannon
never again published anything like his theory of information. He
never even came close. Once he promised the editor of
Scientific American an article on the physics of juggling. If
that didn't seem trivial enough, he followed it up with
(11:43):
an unapologetic letter, You probably think I've been frittering. I say,
frittering away my time while my juggling paper is languishing
on the shelf. This is only half true. I have
come to two conclusions recently. One, I'm a better poet
than scientist. Two. Scientific American should have a poetry column
instead of his juggling research. Shannon enclosed a seventy line
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poem about Rubik's cubes, to be sung to the tune
of Tarara Bundier. He added, I'm still working on the
juggling paper. Shannon never finished it. Not only was he
not producing thunderbolts, he wasn't even producing a study of juggling.
(12:30):
Perhaps we should not be surprised that Claude Shannon was
happy to put aside serious re search when the young
mathematician Ed Thorpe approached him for help in hacking the
roulette table in Vegas. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. If we know anything, we know we're supposed
(12:59):
to stick to a task. Psychologists have developed some attractive
ideas about how success depends on practice and determination. Is
Angela Duckworth, who's popularized the idea of grit, Carol Dwex
research on the growth mindset, and the late and as Ericsson,
the source of the ten thousand hour rule made famous
(13:22):
by Malcolm Gladwell. There are subtleties to each of these
research programs, but the versions that have broken into popular
culture are simple enough. Like some motivational poster, nothing in
this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not.
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius
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will not unrewarded genius is almost proverb. The slogan press
I has solved and always will solve the problems of
the human race. Isn't that great? It's often attributed to
President Calvin Coolidge, but it's older than that. Claude Shannon, however,
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seems not to have gotten the message he achieved so much,
But if it's stuck to a task, couldn't he have
achieved so much more? Instead, he was playing with flamethrowing trumpets,
juggling robots, and silly poems, oh and the impossible task
of beating the casino at roulette. For a junior academic,
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ed Thorpe spent a surprising amount of time in casinos,
using some ferocious mathematics and the best computers he could
access at MIT. Thorpe had figured out that it was
possible to beat the dealer at the casino staple blackjack
by keeping track of the cards that had been played
in placing bets when the deck was offering favorable odds.
(14:52):
Card counting is a familiar idea these days. It all
started with Ed Thorpe. Thorpe's ideas were sophisticated enough to
be worth publishing as an academic paper, which he did,
but he wasn't content with that. He wanted to beat
casino too. To do that, Thorpe had to learn to
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spot crooked dealing, where a disguise count cards unobtrusively late
into the night, and above all, make sure he didn't
get killed. That was no idle worry. One day Thorpe
made a little too much money, and the casino spiked
his coffee with something mysterious that blurred his vision for hours.
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He came back the next day and the casino tried
it again, but Thorpe wasn't scared. His idea to beat
Roulette was the boldest of all. He didn't have in
mind a clever mathematical system. There are loads of them,
and he knew that none of them work. Instead, he
planned to build a computer that could predict where the
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ball would land. That would be hard even today, but
at a time when computers were the size of pianos,
this computer needed to be one that you could seal
inside your clothes, the world's first wearable computer, decades before
the fitbit, Google Glass or the Apple Watch. Thorpe had
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done some experiments on the timing of a Roulette wheel
with his wife, Vivian, a woman who was both intelligent
and indulgent, as you'd need to be if you were
married to Ed Thorpe. But to crack the problem he
needed to team up with perhaps the best gadgeteer in
the world, Claude Shannon. Thorpe spent twenty hours a week
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at Shannon's house he was in heaven. The basement was
a gadgeteers paradise. Moders, transistors, switches, pulleys, gears, condensers, transformers.
I was now happily working with the ultimate gadgeteer. Shannon
and Thorpe were able to time the spinning of the
ball around an upper loop and the contrary motion of
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the wheel itself. With practice, they were to start a
clock within one hundredth of a second and then stop
the clock after ten revolutions. That gave them both the
speed and the position of the ball relative to the wheel,
and Newtonian physics could do the rest. The result of
months of experimentation taught them that, using their computer to
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compute the path of the ball, they could predict that
it would fall into one of five numbers just over
one eighth of the wheel and expect to be right
twenty percent of the time. It seems a modest advantage,
but the potential profits were enormous. All they had to
do was to figure out how to miniaturize that computer,
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making it small enough to slip into a pocket and
carry into the casino undetected. It was an astonishingly audacious
project and a huge effort For the final three weeks,
Thorpe was effectively living at Shannon's house, but by August
nineteen sixty one, the device was ready with their accomplices,
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Vivian Thorpe and Claude's wife, the mathematician Betty Shannon. The
two gadgeteers then took it to the casinos. The Einstein
of computer science was going to Las Vegas. Looking at
Claude Shannon's career from age thirty three onwards, it's hard
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to escape the conclusion that he might have achieved more,
much more, if not for his habit of flitting between
whimsical projects and typically setting them aside before they were finished.
But some very smart people would disagree. Vanavar Bush arguably
knew more than anyone about the way scientific progress occurred.
(18:50):
He guided science policy for the United States during the
Second World War, coordinating the efforts of six thousand researchers.
Bush said that great scientists should range widely and keep
changing things up. In a speech to professors at MIT,
Bush advocated breath rather than depth. It is unfortunate when
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a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a
modern monastic cell. Bush's idea was later backed up by
scientific investigation of scientists themselves. In nineteen fifty eight, a
remarkable study was launched by a young psychologist named Bernice Agison.
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The study followed a group of promising researchers as their
careers unfolded, periodically interviewing them and continuing even after Agison
herself died in nineteen eighty five. Four of the scientists
eventually won Nobel prizes. The findings of the Agison study
support Shannon's habit of flipping from one project to another.
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The scientists who'd most flourished over the decades had switched
back and forth dozens of times. Once you start looking
for this pattern, you see it everywhere. Isaac Newton is
most famous for formulating the law of gravity, but made
huge advances in mathematics and optics. He was the master
of the Royal Mint and was fascinated by economics, and
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devoted as much attention to alchemy as to anything else.
Einstein published four astonishing scientific papers on four different topics,
all in the same year nineteen o five. Charles Darwin
worked simultaneously on the theory of evolution, the definitive two
volume work on Barnacles and a book about the human infant,
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begun while his son William was a baby, and published
just in time for William Darwin's thirty eighth birthday. Multiple
projects aren't unusual at the highest level of science, they're
the norm. Not only that high achieving scientists often have
time consuming side interests, pursuing photography, fine art, or music
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at or near a professional level. Nobel Prize winning scientists
are substantially more likely to have serious hobbies than other
leading scientists, who in turn are more likely to have
them than the rest of us. The later part of
Shannon's career fits right into this highly diverse pattern, but
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then so does the early part. Back in nineteen thirty nine,
shortly after his first thunderbolt, he wrote a note to
an academic mentor, Dear doctor Bush, Yes, Van of our Bush,
the man who knew everyone who mattered in mid century
American science. Of course, he was there to support the
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young Claude Shannon. Dear doctor Bush, I've been working on
three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a
more productive method than sticking to one problem. When Shannon
wrote to Van of oar Bush, he wasn't working on
engineering or logic. He was working on genetics. He knew
nothing about the subject, but swiftly produced a completely new
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kind of algebra to describe and analyzed genetic inheritance. The
work was intriguing and wholly original, but needed developing. Did
Shannon develop it? He did not. In fact, he never
even bothered publishing it. Neither did he ever return to genetics.
Later scholars lament the loss. His new algebra might really
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have advanced the field, but sticking with genetics might also
have meant he never had his second thunderbolt on information theory.
Between those two thunderbolts, Shannon didn't just switch fields. He
lived a rich and complicated life. He married and then
divorced within a year. He moved to Manhattan to spice
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things up. It played chess in Washington Square Park. It
played clarinet. He loved the jazz scene in New York.
He swam, played tennis, stayed up too late, and played
his music too loud. All this was happening when Shannon
was at the peak of his intellectual powers. Shannon didn't
just hit thirty five then and in serious thinking in
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favor of playing around. Shannon was playing around all along.
Maybe Shannon's love of frittering, I say, frittering away his
time on juggling or unicycling, or music or chess. Maybe
that's not the reason he produced only two truly brilliant ideas.
Maybe it's the reason he produced two truly brilliant ideas
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in the first place. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. I try hard to answer all the people
who write to me. I get anxious knowing that the
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task is unfinished. Claude Shannon didn't feel that same compulsion
to clear his inbox. He often left correspondence unanswered, then
eventually cleared the decks through the use of a trash
can marked letters I've procrassed, donated on for too long.
That might seem a trivial thing, but I think it
points to something deeper. Psychologists have identified a tendency called
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completion by us. If you've ever assembled a list of
things to do, then ticked off all the easy ones
while ignoring the important stuff, you've demonstrated completion by us.
That apparently admirable tendency persistence, the determination to finish what
we start well, it could be twisted and perverted if
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we feel compelled to reach the finish line, we also
feel tempted to choose a short racetrack. There's more at
stake here than making ourselves feel better by cheating with
our own to do lists. Psychologists recently studied completion by
us in a high stakes setting, a hospital emergency department.
They found that the busier the emergency room becomes, the
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more the doctors look for quick winds the patients who
aren't really very ill and can therefore be treated swiftly
and ticked off the list, and this behavior is counterproductive.
The more seriously ill patients wait longer, of course, and
the doctors start to slow down after working through a
lot of fairly trivial cases. I expect we all know
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the feeling, but in their subconscious desire to see some
work through to completion, doctors were harming the patients who
were in greatest need. Claude Shannon's willingness to set aside
projects starts to look like a strength rather than a weakness.
Shannons certainly could focus, whether building information theory from scratch
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or building a wearable computer to be Droulette. Yet Shannon
also seemed to have an inner confidence that allowed him
to declare victory at any point that suited him. If
a piece of work was not good enough to publish, fine,
he was happy to leave it unpublished. That juggling paper
is an example, but so too was his early work
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on genetic algebra. One of Claude Channon's colleagues at Bell
Labs praised him as a man of infinite courage. He
was talking about Shannon's intellectual daring, a willingness to march
into unknown territory to begin the search for solutions to
problems that seemed as unbeatable as Roulette. But perhaps courage
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is not quite the right word to describe Shannon's approach.
I prefer in soussions. Claude Channon just wasn't worried. He
didn't feel completion by us the way you and I
feel it. He would walk away from any project at
any time without regret. And if he was willing to
abandon a stalled project, where was the risk? And if
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there was little risk, why talk about courage. Shannon didn't
need courage, He just needed the ability to move on.
In August nineteen sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon met
ed and Vivian Thorpe in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Claude and Ed prepared the wearable computer system, which required
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both of them to operate. Shannon controlled the computer itself,
the size of a cigarette packet, with twelve transistors in it.
He used his toes to trigger silent mercury switches hidden
in his shoes. Thorpe, whose research into blackjack had given
him plenty of experience hanging around in casinos, was the
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one who would place the bets. He had a radio
receiver and an earpiece connected to a hair thin steel wire.
The earpiece played an ascending musical scale. Shannon would use
the toe switches to time a rotation of the wheel
and then the counter rotation of the ball from the
moment it passed a reference mark. Thorpe would hear the
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musical scale stop on a continuous note at the moment
that Shannon finished timing the rotation, and the pitch of
that continuous would indicate in which part of the wheel
the ball was likely to drop. Thorpe still had a
few seconds to place bets and collect the money. Thorpe
knew from hard experience that they had to be careful.
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Their device wasn't illegal, it was far too inconceivable for that,
but it wouldn't go down well if discovered. Beating the
casino required more than just beating the game. That's why
the Shannons and the Thorpes stroll up to the table separately,
pretending not to know each other. It's why Claude Shannon's
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scribbling numbers down, distracting the floor manager from what he's
really doing. All the while he's gazing intently at the
wheel from under his dark eyebrows and his toe, silently
pressing and releasing the hidden control of the computer. And
while Thorpe is standing at the other end of the table,
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cheerfully placing his bets the earpieces, seeing the signals from
Shannon's little computer in giving Thorpe predictions in the form
of musical tones, and Thorpe is winning. Not everything goes smoothly.
The fine wires to Thorpe's earpiece break several times, requiring
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a trip to the bathroom to fix them. At one moment,
a horrified observer sees the earpiece come loose and thinks
some strange insect is crawling out of Thorpe's ear But
fundamentally the computer works perfectly. The chips are stacking up fast.
At the end of the visit to Vegas, the Shannons
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and the Thorpes pondered their options. Ed Thorpe was bullish.
He'd beaten the casinos before and was happy to do
it again, but Betty, Claude and Vivian weren't so sure.
It had been an exhilarating day, but a nerve racking one,
and casino's simply banned players who seemed to in too
much for any reason, so making the computer pay on
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a regular basis would require constantly concealing their identities. Thorpe
was forced to admit they had a point. The computer
clearly worked, and in theory they could use it to
make millions, but was it worth the effort and the risk.
Shannon and Thorpe had had their fun, and they'd proved
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their point to their own satisfaction, and Claude Shannon had
other projects to play with, so after months of hard work,
the world's first wearable computer was retired, undefeated after a
single trip to Vegas. Decades later, Thorpe reflected, I have
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always thought it was a good decision. When I first
thought about writing this cautionary tale, I thought it would
be a warning not to lose focus like Shannon did.
I've changed my mind now. I think Shannon and Thorpe
are inspirational figures. The cautionary tale isn't a warning to
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keep your focus. Instead, it's a warning not to focus
too much. Don't commit yourself so totally to a project
that you lose heart, or lose sight of creative ideas,
or lose your freedom to change course. There's one last
lesson I think we can draw from Claude Shannon's ability
to move on. In their Vegas hotel room, as Shannon
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equipped Thorpe with his earpiece and the fine connecting wires,
Shannon had cocked his head to one side and smiled impishly.
What makes you tick? It was a joke about the
fact that Thorpe was plugged into a machine, but young
Thorpe took it as a deep question from an older
and wiser man. What did make him tick? Professional gambling,
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academic mathematics or something else? But then why choose? Shannons
seem to do it all, from academia to juggling, and
so in the end, would ed Thorpe. You can find
interviews with him well into his eighties, still as sharp
as anything, reminiscing about blackjack and academic mathematics, and the
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hundreds of millions of dollars he eventually made after analyzing
the patterns in financial markets as one of the first quants.
One of the intriguing ideas in Claude Channon's mathematical theory
of communication is that a message can be compressed to
the precise extent that it is predictable. A movie can
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be compressed because each frame tends to resemble the previous one.
A compression algorithm doesn't store the new frame. Instead, it
stores a series of dips changes from the previous frame.
Movies with lots of cuts or fast dramatic movements are
harder to compress. The same is true more or less
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with the way we remember our lives. Although the brain
is not a video recorder and doesn't store diffs, it
does compress memories by recalling the gist of an experience.
If I get up in the morning at the usual time,
eat my regular breakfast, walk the usual route to the station,
and catch the same train as always to the office,
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my brain doesn't trouble itself to remember much. The diffs
aren't worth bothering with a life that's too predictable, creates
few memories. That's what prisoners sometimes say about their years
behind bars. Don't remember much because it was all the
same or the pandemic lockdown for me and perhaps for you,
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involved sitting in the same seat, doing the same thing
every day. Life in lockdown was thin and forgettable. The
opposite experience is a vivid vacation somewhere, packed with new
sights and smells, the people, the language, the architecture, the food.
These complex, rich experiences defy compression. The diffs are too big,
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so the memories are rich. Has it really only been
ten hours since I arrived, you ask yourself. Feels like
a week. So if you want a full life rich
with memories, keep searching for new experiences Like Shannon, don't
be afraid to declare victory and start afresh. Shannon did
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everything the jazz and the juggling of the chess, the
intellectual journey from genetics to the Rubik's cube, the joky robots,
and the flame throwing trumpet, and he really did turn
upside down the way the world thought about digital information.
Not once, but twice isn't twice enough. The key sources
(35:08):
for this episode were Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman's biography
of Claude Shannon, A Mind at Play, and Edward Thorpe's
autobiography A Man for All Markets. For a fullest of references,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
(35:32):
Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonon,
Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
(35:53):
Rachel Hanshaw, cobnor Holbrook, Smith, Reg Lockett, Missia Munroe, and
Rufus Wright. The show would not have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weissberg, hell Faine, John Schnarz,
Carlie mc loori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniellow Lakhan,
(36:15):
and Maya Canning. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
Pushkin. It would be hard to think of a better
example of a game of chance than roulette. Beneath the
romantic French terminology and the myriad rules of etiquette, each
(00:37):
spin of the roulette wheel is utterly random. The casino's
advantage is small that it cannot be overcome. The game
is remorseless over the long haul. The only way to
win is not to play, or is it? One day
in August nineteen sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon stroll
(01:01):
up to a roulette table in Las Vegas, pretending not
to know their companions, Ed and Vivian Thorpe. Claude and
the ladies a nerve us, but they don't show it.
Ed Thorpe isn't nervous, he's excited. He's still in his twenties,
but he's an old hand in the casinos. Claude Shannon
stands right by the wheel. He's forty five years old,
(01:23):
slim and good looking, with fine cheekbones and dark eyebrows.
He's misdirecting the attention of the floor manager by scribbling
down numbers. He looks like he's got some crazy system
that will inevitably bankrupt him. Thorpe is at the other
end of the table, far from the wheel and far
from Shannon. He has dark hair, a round face, and
(01:45):
a smile. He's having fun placing his bets with the
confidence of a man who knows the unbeatable game is
about to be beaten. This is a defining moment in
a project that has been quietly ticking over for a year.
When it began, Thorpe and Shannon didn't know each other.
Edward O'thorpe was a junior mathematics instructor at MIT. Claude
(02:10):
Shannon was the greatest computer scientist in the world. Ed
Thorpe had a plan to beat Roulette, and he needed
Shannon to help him. Systems to beat Roulette are like
blueprints for perpetual motion machines or formulas to turn lead
into gold. They're absurd, the pseudo scientific obsessions of Cranks
(02:32):
and Claude. Shannon's secretary had already warned Thorpe that Professor
Shannon doesn't spend time on topics or people that don't
interest him. Shannon was a legendary figure. People in his
field talked about Shannon the way physicists talk about Albert Einstein.
What ed Thorpe was doing was much like buttonholing Einstein
(02:53):
and saying, Hey, Albert, I've got a sure fire scheme
for beating the bookies at the racetrack. An unknown young mathematician,
a patently futile goal, Claude Shannon, the computing legend, didn't hesitate.
Take a seat. He said to Ed Thorpe. We have
a lot to talk about. I'm Tim Harford. You're listening
(03:19):
to cautionary tales. Repeat. Please please some floora for the present.
(03:46):
How do you receive? Send floa? Please see if you
can read this? Can you read this? Yes? How are signals?
Do you receive? Please send something? Please send bes and bees?
How our signals? Those messages from eighteen fifty eight represent
a full day of attempted conversation via Morse code who
(04:09):
were cable lying three miles under the surface of the
Atlantic Ocean. The cable had been enormously expensive, and, as
he might guess, it wasn't really working. In an attempt
to boost the signal, the project's engineer, a man called
Wildman white House, cranked up the voltage. The cable melted.
(04:32):
It had survived only twenty eight days. Over the years,
telegraph engineers figured out how to work around the problem
of noise on the line. They built stronger cables with
better insulation and more sensitive detectures at the far end.
But nobody fully solved the problem of noise. Nobody even
fully understood it. Not until nearly a century later, along
(04:57):
came Clawed Shannon. Shannon's career was defined by two thunderbolts
of insight. When he was twenty one in nineteen thirty eight,
his master's thesis showed that any logical statement could be
evaluated by a machine, with true or false being represented
by switches being open or closed. Those dots and dashes
(05:19):
of Morse code were just a hint at the possibilities.
Armed only with open or closed on or off dot
or dash zero or one, machines could perform any operation
in mathematics or logic, And rather than merely proving the
point in abstract, Shannon, who was barely old enough to
(05:40):
buy a beer, showed electrical engineers how to efficiently build
a logic machine. Claude Shannon had bridged the vast gap
between electrical wiring diagrams and thought itself unlocking the age
of the digital computer. Shannon's second thunderbolt was published in
(06:03):
nineteen forty eight, when he was working at Bell Lamps
alongside several future Nobel prizewinners, including the team that invented
the transistor, Shannon returned to the deep problem underlying the
Transatlantic cable fiasco. He created a unified mathematical theory of
transmitting information. Some of that theory seems obvious from the
(06:26):
viewpoint of the twenty first century. We now take it
for granted that information bits and bytes and gigabytes might
represent anything a computer game or a spreadsheet, or music
or pornography. But that idea started with Shannon. Before him,
researchers only dimly grasped the distinction between the meaning of
(06:49):
a message and the quantity of information it contained. The
idea of compressing a file so that it took up
less space were Shannon's, and so too was the utterly
radical idea that any amount of noise on a line
could be overcome. We didn't do that by cranking up
the voltage and melting the undersea cable, nor did you
(07:11):
need to build a better listening device or a thicker cable.
No matter how much distortion there was, you could convey
any message if you had enough patience. All you had
to do was add redundancy to the data. It's the
inverse of compressing a file. You add extra data to
make the message more likely to be recoverable. Even in
(07:33):
the presence of interference, that idea was unthinkable, right up
to the point that Claude Shannon improved how to do it.
This new theory of information was revolutionary and so elegant
and general that it could be applied to anything from
the Internet to genetic information in DNA, even though the
(07:57):
Internet did not then exist and the double helix structure
of DNA had not yet been discovered. Shannon wasn't merely
ahead of his time. He was the one who had
wound the clock and set it running. All this and
he'd barely turned thirty. So what did Shannon do for
an encore? Is a description from his biographers, Jimmy Sony
(08:21):
and Rob Goodman of Shannon's work ethic. Shannon arrived late,
if at all, and often spend the day absorbed in
games of chess and hecks in the common areas. When
not besting his colleagues at board games, he would be
found piloting a unicycle through Bell Labs's narrow passageways Occasionally
while juggling. Sometimes he would po go stick his way
(08:44):
around the Bell Labs campus, much to the consternation reimagine
of the people who signed his paychecks. Shannon wasn't goofing
off completely. He often worked hard, but the projects he
worked tom seemed whimsical. For example, he spent many hours
at home playing with a colossal erector set. He built
(09:04):
a robot mouse that could explore a maze and by
trial and error on the first attempt, learn how to
reach its target flawlessly on the second run. The robot
mouse was clever and thought provoking, and it might have
represented real progress towards artificial intelligence if Shannon had persisted
with it. But he didn't. Shannon built perhaps the first
(09:28):
chess playing computer, albeit one that could play only a
radically simplified setup the end game with six pieces. He
published a theoretical paper on computer chess. It could have
been the start of something, but again he lost interest.
It seemed a shame. If anyone could make progress with
computer chess, surely it was Shannon. He was good. Shannon
(09:53):
once traveled to Moscow and played chess with three time
world champion Mikhael Botvinick, and he made Botfinick sweat. When
it wasn't chess, it was juggling. Shannon tried to figure
out how to juggle upside down by hanging from the
ceiling and bouncing the balls off the floor. He built
juggling robots too, and a variety of machines designed to
(10:15):
play abstract games, such as hex and a Rubic's Cube
solving robot, and the Jugglometer and a flame throwing trumpet
and the Ultimate Machine. The Ultimate Machine is a box
with a switch and a trapdoor, and you flick the
switch to turn it on. A robot finger pops out
(10:35):
of the trapdoor and flips the switch back again to
turn itself off. Shannon made giant styrofoam shoes so he
could walk on water at a nearby lake. After Shannon
learned to juggle, ride a unicycle and walk a tight rope,
he formulated the aim of juggling on a unicycle on
a tight rope alas he never got further than two
(10:58):
out of three. Claude Shannon's boss, Henry Pollock, said, Shannon
has earned the right to be nonproductive, and of course
he had, but come on, you're a genius. Claude, You're
thirty three years old. You're the Einstein of computer science,
(11:21):
and you're unicycling, poe going and playing board games. Shannon
never again published anything like his theory of information. He
never even came close. Once he promised the editor of
Scientific American an article on the physics of juggling. If
that didn't seem trivial enough, he followed it up with
(11:43):
an unapologetic letter, You probably think I've been frittering. I say,
frittering away my time while my juggling paper is languishing
on the shelf. This is only half true. I have
come to two conclusions recently. One, I'm a better poet
than scientist. Two. Scientific American should have a poetry column
instead of his juggling research. Shannon enclosed a seventy line
(12:08):
poem about Rubik's cubes, to be sung to the tune
of Tarara Bundier. He added, I'm still working on the
juggling paper. Shannon never finished it. Not only was he
not producing thunderbolts, he wasn't even producing a study of juggling.
(12:30):
Perhaps we should not be surprised that Claude Shannon was
happy to put aside serious re search when the young
mathematician Ed Thorpe approached him for help in hacking the
roulette table in Vegas. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. If we know anything, we know we're supposed
(12:59):
to stick to a task. Psychologists have developed some attractive
ideas about how success depends on practice and determination. Is
Angela Duckworth, who's popularized the idea of grit, Carol Dwex
research on the growth mindset, and the late and as Ericsson,
the source of the ten thousand hour rule made famous
(13:22):
by Malcolm Gladwell. There are subtleties to each of these
research programs, but the versions that have broken into popular
culture are simple enough. Like some motivational poster, nothing in
this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not.
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius
(13:44):
will not unrewarded genius is almost proverb. The slogan press
I has solved and always will solve the problems of
the human race. Isn't that great? It's often attributed to
President Calvin Coolidge, but it's older than that. Claude Shannon, however,
(14:05):
seems not to have gotten the message he achieved so much,
But if it's stuck to a task, couldn't he have
achieved so much more? Instead, he was playing with flamethrowing trumpets,
juggling robots, and silly poems, oh and the impossible task
of beating the casino at roulette. For a junior academic,
(14:29):
ed Thorpe spent a surprising amount of time in casinos,
using some ferocious mathematics and the best computers he could
access at MIT. Thorpe had figured out that it was
possible to beat the dealer at the casino staple blackjack
by keeping track of the cards that had been played
in placing bets when the deck was offering favorable odds.
(14:52):
Card counting is a familiar idea these days. It all
started with Ed Thorpe. Thorpe's ideas were sophisticated enough to
be worth publishing as an academic paper, which he did,
but he wasn't content with that. He wanted to beat
casino too. To do that, Thorpe had to learn to
(15:13):
spot crooked dealing, where a disguise count cards unobtrusively late
into the night, and above all, make sure he didn't
get killed. That was no idle worry. One day Thorpe
made a little too much money, and the casino spiked
his coffee with something mysterious that blurred his vision for hours.
(15:36):
He came back the next day and the casino tried
it again, but Thorpe wasn't scared. His idea to beat
Roulette was the boldest of all. He didn't have in
mind a clever mathematical system. There are loads of them,
and he knew that none of them work. Instead, he
planned to build a computer that could predict where the
(15:58):
ball would land. That would be hard even today, but
at a time when computers were the size of pianos,
this computer needed to be one that you could seal
inside your clothes, the world's first wearable computer, decades before
the fitbit, Google Glass or the Apple Watch. Thorpe had
(16:21):
done some experiments on the timing of a Roulette wheel
with his wife, Vivian, a woman who was both intelligent
and indulgent, as you'd need to be if you were
married to Ed Thorpe. But to crack the problem he
needed to team up with perhaps the best gadgeteer in
the world, Claude Shannon. Thorpe spent twenty hours a week
(16:44):
at Shannon's house he was in heaven. The basement was
a gadgeteers paradise. Moders, transistors, switches, pulleys, gears, condensers, transformers.
I was now happily working with the ultimate gadgeteer. Shannon
and Thorpe were able to time the spinning of the
ball around an upper loop and the contrary motion of
(17:06):
the wheel itself. With practice, they were to start a
clock within one hundredth of a second and then stop
the clock after ten revolutions. That gave them both the
speed and the position of the ball relative to the wheel,
and Newtonian physics could do the rest. The result of
months of experimentation taught them that, using their computer to
(17:27):
compute the path of the ball, they could predict that
it would fall into one of five numbers just over
one eighth of the wheel and expect to be right
twenty percent of the time. It seems a modest advantage,
but the potential profits were enormous. All they had to
do was to figure out how to miniaturize that computer,
(17:48):
making it small enough to slip into a pocket and
carry into the casino undetected. It was an astonishingly audacious
project and a huge effort For the final three weeks,
Thorpe was effectively living at Shannon's house, but by August
nineteen sixty one, the device was ready with their accomplices,
(18:09):
Vivian Thorpe and Claude's wife, the mathematician Betty Shannon. The
two gadgeteers then took it to the casinos. The Einstein
of computer science was going to Las Vegas. Looking at
Claude Shannon's career from age thirty three onwards, it's hard
(18:29):
to escape the conclusion that he might have achieved more,
much more, if not for his habit of flitting between
whimsical projects and typically setting them aside before they were finished.
But some very smart people would disagree. Vanavar Bush arguably
knew more than anyone about the way scientific progress occurred.
(18:50):
He guided science policy for the United States during the
Second World War, coordinating the efforts of six thousand researchers.
Bush said that great scientists should range widely and keep
changing things up. In a speech to professors at MIT,
Bush advocated breath rather than depth. It is unfortunate when
(19:12):
a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a
modern monastic cell. Bush's idea was later backed up by
scientific investigation of scientists themselves. In nineteen fifty eight, a
remarkable study was launched by a young psychologist named Bernice Agison.
(19:33):
The study followed a group of promising researchers as their
careers unfolded, periodically interviewing them and continuing even after Agison
herself died in nineteen eighty five. Four of the scientists
eventually won Nobel prizes. The findings of the Agison study
support Shannon's habit of flipping from one project to another.
(19:54):
The scientists who'd most flourished over the decades had switched
back and forth dozens of times. Once you start looking
for this pattern, you see it everywhere. Isaac Newton is
most famous for formulating the law of gravity, but made
huge advances in mathematics and optics. He was the master
of the Royal Mint and was fascinated by economics, and
(20:17):
devoted as much attention to alchemy as to anything else.
Einstein published four astonishing scientific papers on four different topics,
all in the same year nineteen o five. Charles Darwin
worked simultaneously on the theory of evolution, the definitive two
volume work on Barnacles and a book about the human infant,
(20:39):
begun while his son William was a baby, and published
just in time for William Darwin's thirty eighth birthday. Multiple
projects aren't unusual at the highest level of science, they're
the norm. Not only that high achieving scientists often have
time consuming side interests, pursuing photography, fine art, or music
(21:01):
at or near a professional level. Nobel Prize winning scientists
are substantially more likely to have serious hobbies than other
leading scientists, who in turn are more likely to have
them than the rest of us. The later part of
Shannon's career fits right into this highly diverse pattern, but
(21:22):
then so does the early part. Back in nineteen thirty nine,
shortly after his first thunderbolt, he wrote a note to
an academic mentor, Dear doctor Bush, Yes, Van of our Bush,
the man who knew everyone who mattered in mid century
American science. Of course, he was there to support the
(21:43):
young Claude Shannon. Dear doctor Bush, I've been working on
three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a
more productive method than sticking to one problem. When Shannon
wrote to Van of oar Bush, he wasn't working on
engineering or logic. He was working on genetics. He knew
nothing about the subject, but swiftly produced a completely new
(22:06):
kind of algebra to describe and analyzed genetic inheritance. The
work was intriguing and wholly original, but needed developing. Did
Shannon develop it? He did not. In fact, he never
even bothered publishing it. Neither did he ever return to genetics.
Later scholars lament the loss. His new algebra might really
(22:28):
have advanced the field, but sticking with genetics might also
have meant he never had his second thunderbolt on information theory.
Between those two thunderbolts, Shannon didn't just switch fields. He
lived a rich and complicated life. He married and then
divorced within a year. He moved to Manhattan to spice
(22:49):
things up. It played chess in Washington Square Park. It
played clarinet. He loved the jazz scene in New York.
He swam, played tennis, stayed up too late, and played
his music too loud. All this was happening when Shannon
was at the peak of his intellectual powers. Shannon didn't
just hit thirty five then and in serious thinking in
(23:10):
favor of playing around. Shannon was playing around all along.
Maybe Shannon's love of frittering, I say, frittering away his
time on juggling or unicycling, or music or chess. Maybe
that's not the reason he produced only two truly brilliant ideas.
Maybe it's the reason he produced two truly brilliant ideas
(23:34):
in the first place. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. I try hard to answer all the people
who write to me. I get anxious knowing that the
(23:54):
task is unfinished. Claude Shannon didn't feel that same compulsion
to clear his inbox. He often left correspondence unanswered, then
eventually cleared the decks through the use of a trash
can marked letters I've procrassed, donated on for too long.
That might seem a trivial thing, but I think it
points to something deeper. Psychologists have identified a tendency called
(24:18):
completion by us. If you've ever assembled a list of
things to do, then ticked off all the easy ones
while ignoring the important stuff, you've demonstrated completion by us.
That apparently admirable tendency persistence, the determination to finish what
we start well, it could be twisted and perverted if
(24:39):
we feel compelled to reach the finish line, we also
feel tempted to choose a short racetrack. There's more at
stake here than making ourselves feel better by cheating with
our own to do lists. Psychologists recently studied completion by
us in a high stakes setting, a hospital emergency department.
They found that the busier the emergency room becomes, the
(25:02):
more the doctors look for quick winds the patients who
aren't really very ill and can therefore be treated swiftly
and ticked off the list, and this behavior is counterproductive.
The more seriously ill patients wait longer, of course, and
the doctors start to slow down after working through a
lot of fairly trivial cases. I expect we all know
(25:23):
the feeling, but in their subconscious desire to see some
work through to completion, doctors were harming the patients who
were in greatest need. Claude Shannon's willingness to set aside
projects starts to look like a strength rather than a weakness.
Shannons certainly could focus, whether building information theory from scratch
(25:48):
or building a wearable computer to be Droulette. Yet Shannon
also seemed to have an inner confidence that allowed him
to declare victory at any point that suited him. If
a piece of work was not good enough to publish, fine,
he was happy to leave it unpublished. That juggling paper
is an example, but so too was his early work
(26:08):
on genetic algebra. One of Claude Channon's colleagues at Bell
Labs praised him as a man of infinite courage. He
was talking about Shannon's intellectual daring, a willingness to march
into unknown territory to begin the search for solutions to
problems that seemed as unbeatable as Roulette. But perhaps courage
(26:32):
is not quite the right word to describe Shannon's approach.
I prefer in soussions. Claude Channon just wasn't worried. He
didn't feel completion by us the way you and I
feel it. He would walk away from any project at
any time without regret. And if he was willing to
abandon a stalled project, where was the risk? And if
(26:55):
there was little risk, why talk about courage. Shannon didn't
need courage, He just needed the ability to move on.
In August nineteen sixty one, Claude and Betty Shannon met
ed and Vivian Thorpe in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
Claude and Ed prepared the wearable computer system, which required
(27:18):
both of them to operate. Shannon controlled the computer itself,
the size of a cigarette packet, with twelve transistors in it.
He used his toes to trigger silent mercury switches hidden
in his shoes. Thorpe, whose research into blackjack had given
him plenty of experience hanging around in casinos, was the
(27:38):
one who would place the bets. He had a radio
receiver and an earpiece connected to a hair thin steel wire.
The earpiece played an ascending musical scale. Shannon would use
the toe switches to time a rotation of the wheel
and then the counter rotation of the ball from the
moment it passed a reference mark. Thorpe would hear the
(28:00):
musical scale stop on a continuous note at the moment
that Shannon finished timing the rotation, and the pitch of
that continuous would indicate in which part of the wheel
the ball was likely to drop. Thorpe still had a
few seconds to place bets and collect the money. Thorpe
knew from hard experience that they had to be careful.
(28:24):
Their device wasn't illegal, it was far too inconceivable for that,
but it wouldn't go down well if discovered. Beating the
casino required more than just beating the game. That's why
the Shannons and the Thorpes stroll up to the table separately,
pretending not to know each other. It's why Claude Shannon's
(28:44):
scribbling numbers down, distracting the floor manager from what he's
really doing. All the while he's gazing intently at the
wheel from under his dark eyebrows and his toe, silently
pressing and releasing the hidden control of the computer. And
while Thorpe is standing at the other end of the table,
(29:06):
cheerfully placing his bets the earpieces, seeing the signals from
Shannon's little computer in giving Thorpe predictions in the form
of musical tones, and Thorpe is winning. Not everything goes smoothly.
The fine wires to Thorpe's earpiece break several times, requiring
(29:28):
a trip to the bathroom to fix them. At one moment,
a horrified observer sees the earpiece come loose and thinks
some strange insect is crawling out of Thorpe's ear But
fundamentally the computer works perfectly. The chips are stacking up fast.
At the end of the visit to Vegas, the Shannons
(29:50):
and the Thorpes pondered their options. Ed Thorpe was bullish.
He'd beaten the casinos before and was happy to do
it again, but Betty, Claude and Vivian weren't so sure.
It had been an exhilarating day, but a nerve racking one,
and casino's simply banned players who seemed to in too
much for any reason, so making the computer pay on
(30:12):
a regular basis would require constantly concealing their identities. Thorpe
was forced to admit they had a point. The computer
clearly worked, and in theory they could use it to
make millions, but was it worth the effort and the risk.
Shannon and Thorpe had had their fun, and they'd proved
(30:34):
their point to their own satisfaction, and Claude Shannon had
other projects to play with, so after months of hard work,
the world's first wearable computer was retired, undefeated after a
single trip to Vegas. Decades later, Thorpe reflected, I have
(30:57):
always thought it was a good decision. When I first
thought about writing this cautionary tale, I thought it would
be a warning not to lose focus like Shannon did.
I've changed my mind now. I think Shannon and Thorpe
are inspirational figures. The cautionary tale isn't a warning to
(31:19):
keep your focus. Instead, it's a warning not to focus
too much. Don't commit yourself so totally to a project
that you lose heart, or lose sight of creative ideas,
or lose your freedom to change course. There's one last
lesson I think we can draw from Claude Shannon's ability
to move on. In their Vegas hotel room, as Shannon
(31:43):
equipped Thorpe with his earpiece and the fine connecting wires,
Shannon had cocked his head to one side and smiled impishly.
What makes you tick? It was a joke about the
fact that Thorpe was plugged into a machine, but young
Thorpe took it as a deep question from an older
and wiser man. What did make him tick? Professional gambling,
(32:06):
academic mathematics or something else? But then why choose? Shannons
seem to do it all, from academia to juggling, and
so in the end, would ed Thorpe. You can find
interviews with him well into his eighties, still as sharp
as anything, reminiscing about blackjack and academic mathematics, and the
(32:28):
hundreds of millions of dollars he eventually made after analyzing
the patterns in financial markets as one of the first quants.
One of the intriguing ideas in Claude Channon's mathematical theory
of communication is that a message can be compressed to
the precise extent that it is predictable. A movie can
(32:50):
be compressed because each frame tends to resemble the previous one.
A compression algorithm doesn't store the new frame. Instead, it
stores a series of dips changes from the previous frame.
Movies with lots of cuts or fast dramatic movements are
harder to compress. The same is true more or less
(33:10):
with the way we remember our lives. Although the brain
is not a video recorder and doesn't store diffs, it
does compress memories by recalling the gist of an experience.
If I get up in the morning at the usual time,
eat my regular breakfast, walk the usual route to the station,
and catch the same train as always to the office,
(33:31):
my brain doesn't trouble itself to remember much. The diffs
aren't worth bothering with a life that's too predictable, creates
few memories. That's what prisoners sometimes say about their years
behind bars. Don't remember much because it was all the
same or the pandemic lockdown for me and perhaps for you,
(33:51):
involved sitting in the same seat, doing the same thing
every day. Life in lockdown was thin and forgettable. The
opposite experience is a vivid vacation somewhere, packed with new
sights and smells, the people, the language, the architecture, the food.
These complex, rich experiences defy compression. The diffs are too big,
(34:16):
so the memories are rich. Has it really only been
ten hours since I arrived, you ask yourself. Feels like
a week. So if you want a full life rich
with memories, keep searching for new experiences Like Shannon, don't
be afraid to declare victory and start afresh. Shannon did
(34:36):
everything the jazz and the juggling of the chess, the
intellectual journey from genetics to the Rubik's cube, the joky robots,
and the flame throwing trumpet, and he really did turn
upside down the way the world thought about digital information.
Not once, but twice isn't twice enough. The key sources
(35:08):
for this episode were Jimmy Sony and Rob Goodman's biography
of Claude Shannon, A Mind at Play, and Edward Thorpe's
autobiography A Man for All Markets. For a fullest of references,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
(35:32):
Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonon,
Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
(35:53):
Rachel Hanshaw, cobnor Holbrook, Smith, Reg Lockett, Missia Munroe, and
Rufus Wright. The show would not have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weissberg, hell Faine, John Schnarz,
Carlie mc loori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniellow Lakhan,
(36:15):
and Maya Canning. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
Host
Tim Harford
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.