A UK activist clade is taking on the insidious digital fruit machine (AKA, “slot machine”). These things are supposed to be random and fair, but by design or by glitch, the pubside gambling systems are anything but.

Fruit machines cheat you on practically every spin of the reels. Almost every spin is entirely predetermined - which symbols are going to drop in, whether you're going to be awarded nudges, which numbers the "random" stop will land on, the lot. Ever had two cherries on the win line, not held them, then watched the third one drop in on the next spin and thought, "Damn, if I'd held them I'd have won"? Well, you wouldn't. If you'd held the two cherries, the machine would have dropped in a different symbol. And now we can prove it.

LinkDiscuss

(via NTK)

[via Boing Boing Blog]

Nice technique for proving program behavior without looking at its code. To summarize: they run the machine’s software inside a program on a regular desktop computer, and save the state of RAM at various points. Then they can “go back in time” at will by restoring RAM, and try making different choices.

By the way, wouldn’t it be interesting if you could do that with the real world? You could try out different things to see how people, or the world, would react, without risk of harm. Physics with “undo”. Heaven for opportunists.