In 1976, J. Doyne Farmer walked into a casino in Las Vegas and committed a robbery. Nobody noticed him doing it: to anyone else it would have seemed as though the lanky 24-year-old was simply playing a little roulette. Casinos watch carefully for cheating at card tables, but the spinning roulette wheel is effectively a random number generator for which the only strategy was to take a lucky guess. Farmer had found a way to beat the odds.

As the wheel spun and the ball clattered, he began pressing switches hidden in his shoes, following a pattern he had spent hours practising at home. A click when the ball passed one reference point, a click when the wheel had rotated by a certain amount.

New Statesman