William Poundstone Quotes

In American culture the coin toss is the paradigm of the random event. A coin toss decides who kicks off the Super Bowl. Looked at another way, a coin toss is not random at all. It is physics.

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.

For reasons mathematical, psychological, and sociological, it is a good idea to use a money management system that is relatively forgiving of estimation errors.

The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.

From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math.

The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.

Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.

Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.

Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are.

The dealer now theorized that Thorp was memorizing the entire deck. He knew exactly which cards remained in the deck and bet accordingly. Thorp said it was impossible for any one to do that.

By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.

A bit is worth 10,000 basis points.

"Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small.

There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon.