I’ve just read about a gambling syndicate that has gone bust losing people millions of pounds.  It reminds me that in 1967, my college installed an IBM 360 computer – one of the first in the country – and gave us engineering students some programming lessons. I was also a member of the college’s backstage works team which was an eclectic mix of students from all over the college and from UCH (University College Hospital) over the road. I discussed what we might do with this amazing machine and apart from making some bell-ringing software (obviously!), a maths student friend and I started thinking about some statistical software to win the football pools.  As I recall, correctly predicting 8 score draws was enough to win the £75,000 jackpot (in the days when a nice house cost £3,000).

We’d worked out that by inputting the football results each week, we could analyse the factors that would lead to a score-draw and thus greatly increase our chance of the jackpot.  Then one of the girls who I greatly admired as heaven on legs (due to her amazing brain, of course) dashed all our dreams by pointing out that even if our software were able to predict the most likely score draws, it would never win us any real money!  Talk about illusions shattered!  Her reasoning was that everyone else would be trying to do the same, computer or no, and that any time we did predict the jackpot, this would be the result that everyone could predict, and thus the jackpot would be shared between so many other punters that the winnings would be puny.

We needed a program that could predict the result that no-one expected, and this is by definition impossible.

I came down to earth with a bump, realising that gambling is a mug’s game, although living in Epsom, I still have a flutter on the Derby, and quite often get my money back.  But I also realised that if you want a nice house, the only way is to work hard! And in that endeavour, sadly lost touch with the one who taught me much.