Hacker Cinema
21
2008 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Robert Luketic
Ben Campbell is a young, highly intelligent student at M.I.T. who strives to succeed. Wanting a scholarship to transfer to Harvard School of Medicine to become a doctor, Ben learns that he cannot afford the $300,000 tuition as he comes from a poor, working-class background. But one evening, Ben is introduced by his unorthodox math professor to a small but secretive club of five students, Jill, Choi, Kianna, and Fisher, who are being trained by Professor Rosa to count cards at blackjack.
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18 comments on Hacker News
I watched the movie '21' (2008) for free on YouTube yesterday.
The opening of the movie features the MIT campus full of students navigating its grounds and all the promise and status that higher education brings. [0]
Gave me the same sense of sadness realizing how much will fall to AI.
[0] - https://youtu.be/0lsUsWdkk0Y?si=TJl7f_b1RcWcDqF8&t=278
I like this book. The probability section is great, especially how they handle the Monty Hall paradox. They use "four step method" that breaks it down perfectly - way clearer than the explanations you get in movies like 21 or numb3rs.
a decade ago i saw "21 movie" and loved this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYyUuIXzGgI
Recently I came across this video again, so I built an interactive web simulator to demonstrate the Monty Hall problem using nextjs.
Link: https://montyhallsim.vercel.app/
Would appreciate feedback on it and any edge cases I might have missed :)
Time to watch the movie 21 at that time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film)
This indeed reminds me the blackjack movie 21
> The money is to be made telling stories about it vs doing it. Which is why I think the article is complete fiction.
It's funny, but it also just reads like bad fiction to me. The dialogue doesn't seem natural, and the writing doesn't sound so much like someone describing something they actually experienced as it does like someone mimicking a storytelling style they've seen elsewhere. Add on top of it that almost every aspect of it seems ripped directly from the first half of "21" (the Kevin Spacey movie about the MIT crew) and it just comes across as an amateurish attempt to borrow someone else's story. The fact that these techniques she claims they used just don't work anymore seals it for me.
That was the strategy used in the '21' movie with Kevin Spacey which was actually based on a true story!
An interesting bit of computer history trivia is that Claude Shannon co-invented the first wearable computer with Ed Thorp to beat roulette in Vegas in 1961. It used a button in the shoe as an input device for the user to record the speed and location of the ball which was used to infer the likely ending location using orbital decay algorithms. An auditory signal was then sent by wire to an earpiece to let the user know where to place bets (it wasn't pinpoint accurate - the user would bet on 8 numbers which still gave him a positive expected value).
The story around that is really fun, recounted in this paper: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/thorp.pdf
Versions of the same device from this century use lasers to get a more accurate read on the ball's location, with one group using the system to net £1m from London's Casinos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4069629.stm
Thorp was also involved in developing the Blackjack system that was showcased in the film 21 and later ran a hedge fund, details on which were recounted in his interview for this book https://www.amazon.com/Hedge-Fund-Market-Wizards-Winning/dp/1118273044. Very interesting guy.
Fair enough, seems like valid concerns.
But the media, with the movie 21 and the huge amount of poker tournaments on TV, seems to make is quite a 'cool' thing to do.
Maybe reality isn't as romanticised as the TV, but I guess playing poker takes a lot of skill and loads of hours, multitasking and so on that could translate to 'willing to put in work + smarts' that some recruiter could enjoy?
Maybe you should compile these facts, time spent, focus on the 'number aspect' of it. And such things. Put this and 'self sustained/employed?' on your resume etc.
Honestly I have no idea what hiring managers would think, and maybe I am far from their mindset.
One of the worst such cases was the movie 21, where the real life MIT Blackjack Team (mostly asian) was portrayed by white actors.
I was once asked to solve the monty hall problem a couple days after I saw the movie "21"
Thats in the movie "21" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film))
You might be thinking of the movie 21, the MIT blackjack team does exactly this.
Excited to see it. I just hope the real life facts dont get in the way of my enjoyment. At this point, if they try to make Eduardo out to be the good guy, I'm probably going to walk out of it. In every report I've read about the early stages of that company, that guy sounds like a real douche-bag.
Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House was a good read, but it sounded very embellished / made up. I didn't trust it as a read of non-fiction. And the movie 21 was just a complete piece of crap.
However this movie is directed by the guy who did Fight Club, so I'm sure it'll be turn out (and be reviewed) pretty well
Wasn't this in the movie 21?
Casinos really only have Blackjack tables because patrons want them, or else they would probably get rid of them pretty quickly.
True, even with a simple strategy you can cut your theoretical loss to about 1-2% (without counting cards). But casinos have blackjack because most players don't know how to play. Most people don't follow that simple strategy (they often have leaflets explaining it too!).
With counting cards you can make it profitable for you. But casinos will make life very difficult for you if they find out you're counting cards. See also the movie about the MIT Blackjack team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film)
I'm a little surprised "21" wasn't mentioned yet. The movie, like the book "Bringing Down the House", is a fictionalized account of a true story about how the MIT blackjack club took Vegas casinos for many thousands of dollars.
This is also explained well by Kevin Spacey in the movie 21.