Digg is letting their computer geeks/gurus choose today's content and this was one of their picks.
The editorial team gets to run the show 364 days out of the year. But
today, the developers finally have control. And they want you to see the
Digg no one else gets to see.
From Wired, October 2014:
John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak.
On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the
Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine
called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of
the machine flashed, signaling a $4,300 jackpot. Kane waited while the
slot attendant verified the win and presented the IRS paperwork—a
procedure required for any win of $1,200 or greater—then, 11 minutes
later, ding ding ding!, a $2,800 win. A $4,150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that.
All the while, the casino's director of surveillance, Charles
Williams, was peering down at Kane through a camera hidden in a ceiling
dome. Tall, with a high brow and an aquiline nose, the 50-year-old Kane
had the patrician bearing of a man better suited to playing a Mozart
piano concerto than listening to the chirping of a slot machine. Even
his play was refined: the way he rested his long fingers on the buttons
and swept them in a graceful legato, smoothly selecting good cards,
discarding bad ones, accepting jackpot after jackpot with the vaguely
put-upon air of a creditor finally collecting an overdue debt.
Williams could see that Kane was wielding none of the array of
cheating devices that casinos had confiscated from grifters over the
years. He wasn't jamming a light wand in the machine's hopper or zapping
the Game King with an electromagnetic pulse. He was simply pressing
the buttons. But he was winning far too much, too fast, to be relying on
luck alone.
At 12:34 pm, the Game King lit up with its seventh jackpot in an hour
and a half, a $10,400 payout. Now Williams knew something was wrong:
The cards dealt on the screen were the exact same four deuces and four
of clubs that yielded Kane's previous jackpot. The odds against that
were astronomical. Williams called over the executive in charge of the
Silverton's slots, and they reviewed the surveillance tape together.
The evidence was mounting that Kane had found something unthinkable:
the kind of thing gamblers dream of, casinos dread, and Nevada
regulators have an entire auditing regime to prevent. He'd found a bug
in the most popular video slot in Las Vegas.
As they watched the replay for clues, Kane chalked up an eighth
jackpot worth $8,200, and Williams decided not to wait any longer. He
contacted the Silverton's head of security, a formidable character with
slicked-back silver hair and a black suit, and positioned him outside
the slot area. His orders: Make sure John Kane doesn't leave the casino
Kane had discovered the glitch in the Game King three months earlier
on the other end of town, at the unpretentious Fremont Hotel and Casino
in downtown's Glitter Gulch. He was overdue for a lucky break. Since the
Game King had gotten its hooks in him years earlier he'd lost between
tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands annually. At his previous
haunt, the locals-friendly Boulder Station, he blew half a million
dollars in 2006 alone—a pace that earned him enough Player's Club points
to pay for his own Game King to play at his home on the outskirts of
Vegas, along with technicians to service it. (The machine was just for
fun—it didn't pay jackpots.) “He's played more than anyone else in the
United States,” says his lawyer, Andrew Leavitt. “I'm not exaggerating
or embellishing. It's an addiction.”
To understand video poker addiction, you have to start with the
deceptively simple appeal of the game. You put some money in the
machine, place a bet of one to five credits, and the computer deals you a
poker hand. Select the cards you want to keep, slap the Draw button,
and the machine replaces the discards. Your final hand determines the
payout.
When the first video poker machine hit casinos in the 1970s, it was a
phenomenal success—gamblers loved that they could make decisions that
affected the outcome instead of just pulling a handle and watching the
reels spin. The patent holder started a company called International
Game Technology that debuted on the Nasdaq in 1981.
IGT's key insight was to tap into the vast flexibility offered by
computerized gambling. In 1996, the company perfected its formula with
the Game King Multi-Game, which allowed players to choose from several
variations on video poker. Casinos snatched up the Game King, and IGT
sold them regular firmware upgrades that added still more games to the
menu. On September 25, 2002, the company released its fifth major
revision—Game King 5.0. Its marketing material was triumphal: “Full of
new enhancements, including state-of-the-art video graphics and enhanced
stereo sound, the Game King 5.0 Multi-Game suite is sure to rule over
your entire casino floor with unprecedented magnificence!” But the new
Game King code had one feature that wasn't in the brochure—a series of
subtle errors in program number G0001640 that evaded laboratory testing
and source code review.
The bug survived like a cockroach for the next seven years. It passed
into new revisions, one after another, ultimately infecting 99 different
programs installed in thousands of IGT machines around the world. As
far as anyone knows, it went completely undetected until late April
2009, when John Kane was playing at a row of four low-limit Game Kings
outside the entrance to a Chinese fast food joint at the Fremont, smoke
swirling around him and '90s pop music raining down from the casino
sound system......MORE
