Gambling has provided centuries of inspiration to probabilists and statisticians. The process continues. There also exist fundamental links between betting and a newer subject, Information Theory, which began with Claude Shannon and his ground-breaking 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is a result which arises very naturally. A successful gambler and a successful data compression algorithm must both accurately estimate probability distributions. There are practical results as well as theoretical: Shannon and colleagues, including the legendary gambler and mathematician Edward Thorp, actually attempted to apply results from information theory in Las Vegas casinos and stock market transactions. Oliver Johnson examines the connections.
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