The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Gambling

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Robin Ince and Brian Cox ask why some people always seem to win as they investigate the science of gambling. They hear how playing monopoly is no way to make friends, but don’t worry, because psychologist Richard Wiseman claims that it’s never really good fun anyway. In fact, games are mainly a form of social bonding and studies show deception could even be essential to human behaviour, which may just explain why so many people cheat. So should we even bother playing them? Well, it just so happens that solving maths problems can help us in other areas of life, so the team tackle a conundrum involving a goat, a cabbage and very hungry wolf, before becoming side-tracked by a debate over why the three were ever on a trip together in the first place, let alone trying to cross a river.New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemEpisodes featured: Series 15: How to Beat the House and Win Series 3: Randomness Series 11: Deception

BBC Sounds music radio podcast. Hello I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. And this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide To… And today it is an Infinite Monkeys Guide To gambling. But more specifically the science of gambling. The science of… is there a science… I suppose that's what we're going to find out really but that idea that you could cite it because then eventually surely all gamblers would

buy that book and then the house would always lose and that would be the end of gambling. The gambling industry is of course much like the alcohol industry. They say drink responsibly and gamble carefully. I'm not entirely sure that is what they really mean. Gambling looks like a game of chance, but is there really a way to maximise the chance or will the house always win? You'd be good at poker. Why? Because you'd have that smiling face, the smiling face of an

assassin, and they would never know were you smiling because you had a great hand or not. Well, if anybody's going to know whether I'd make a good poker player it's Richard Wiseman. He's a psychologist, but he's also someone who can make cards appear and disappear because he's a conjurer as well, and that's a killer combination. He talked with writer Helen Zoltzman about the importance of trying to have fun combined with the importance of winning. What I find amazing psychologically is people are so happy when they've won they kind of go oh yes look at me like I've won I've got and you think hold on a second a lot of this had to do with the roll of the dice was chance or the way you shuffle cards whatever the game is chance. You won because of a chance event but instead of putting anything out there like that,

you can go, look at me. I won. Disgusting. But isn't that though? I was thinking about the, I was thinking about, you know, a lot of people say this about the stock market. There's very, I don't know if it's true, but someone can comment, but there's this famous analysis

that said you could throw darts at the FTSE 100 and just invest in that, and you would do, statistically as well over time, as someone who thinks that they're reading patterns That's a character type isn't it? Yes, that's right. We didn't experiment years ago where we had three whether a professional investor We had a financial astrologer that looked at when companies were formed and on the basis of that predicted when to invest in them Put it for the radio listeners, that was a very surprised look. And a five-year-old child. And we gave them all 5,000 pounds to invest,

and then we tracked them, I think, for 10 days. And the kid outperformed the other two. And we said to the astrologer, are you surprised at the outcome? And she said, no, because the child is Pisces, and they're traditionally very lucky. Helen, is our game, do you think, in the end, the actual, the agony for the loser, the frequent frustration, again,

as we're saying, this will be going out a few weeks after Christmas, where, you know, family rouse over pies in trivial pursuit, over, you know, Cluedo, Mastermind, whatever it might be, that actually for the benefit of the limited joy of the victor compared to the agony of the losers, says a great deal about humans. In games like Monopoly, my tactic is usually get into jail as soon as possible,

sit out the rest of the game in there, because it is not fun. That is a game that rewards people that are very into admin and buying a lot of houses and ruining everyone else's lives and that is too close to reality. No I think that in terms of of game playing I think Helen's exactly right. It should be as much fun as possible. For me as a psychologist it's about bonding. I mean you don't sit around at Christmas or whenever and just alienate everyone else around the table as you go, yes I won. You think well what kind of achievement is that? You know so these should be about having fun. That just seems to me that the key thing and my mathematician colleagues much as I respect them have taken away a lot of that fun for me.

Is the secret of gambling understanding psychology or is it the mathematics? Because if it's mathematics, is it? So if I deal out two hands of cards, at what point of shuffling and dealing and shuffling and dealing do you think there could possibly begin to be a mathematical model that was worth following? If you know about probability then you can tip the odds in your favour. Right. That's the point. But only tip the odds in your favour. Right. That's the point. But only tip the odds in your favour. You can never definitely be sure that you're gonna have a winning hand. Your psychology. You should do poker honestly. No no no really I think it's gonna work for you. Anyway we wanted to work out was it

mathematics? Is it psychology? How much is both of those things? So we gathered together a unique panel of mathematicians, in so much as one of them is the only mathematician that I know to have pretended to be Pele for money. In fact when I say the only mathematician I know who's pretended to be Pele, he's the only mathematician I know who's pretended to be any footballer. Or the only person you know who's pretended to be Pele. Well here is Pele's autobiography, Alex Belos, with mathematician Hannah Fry, psychologist Richard Wiseman and Helen Zaltzman on a classic conundrum. So there's a traveler with his wolf, his goat and his bunch of cabbages and he gets to a river.

He's got to get to the other side, fantastic, and then he sees there's a boat there but the boat only has space for himself and one of those items. He cannot leave the goat with the cabbages because the goat will eat the cabbages and he cannot leave the goat with the cabbages because the goat will eat the cabbages and he cannot leave the wolf with the goat because the wolf will eat the goat. How does he do it? And this is a puzzle which was first written down in the 8th century and I would say is probably the most viral in the sense that it's probably spread to more people in the history of civilization

than any anyone else but by the 13th century there's a text that says that every five-year-old in the world can solve this problem this puzzle. Richard is logic logical thinking difficult for human beings is it sort of an alien response to the world something has to be learned well I Think it is I mean I think comes naturally to us I mean this instance you think as psychologists a man arrives with a wolf a goat and some cabbages I'll be thinking what's going on? Yeah, I wouldn't be thinking how'd you get those across so I think what kind of man is this that he's He's been traveling with a wolf and a goat and some cabbages

I might have been traveling with his wife originally and then he kind of screwed up the going across the river at the first and went, the wolf's eaten my wife. So it could be that it was a much bigger group initially and this is what he's left with after going, left the wolf there again. So I think that's a more interesting scenario. I'd quite like to explore that as a psychologist. Wouldn't they all have eaten each other before they got to the river anyway? Now we're getting somewhere, you see?

So I think sometimes the difference perhaps between psychologists and mathematicians is a psychologist eventually makes up the answer and mathematicians are determined to get it right. Unbelievable. He's got a wolf, he's got a goat, he's got some cabbages and no one's asking the why question. That's all. It's kind of a cliché that mathematics almost should be, I'm going to say should be useless, but you know what I mean, in a very powerful sense. There's certainly pure mathematicians.

There doesn't have to be a contact with the real world in terms of usefulness, although as you've said, time and again, these puzzles lead to useful mathematics. I mean, is that a fair characterization? I think so. I mean traditionally maths is divided into kind of pure maths which is that you know totally pointless just playing around with shapes and patterns and the applied maths which is you know try to solve problems. I mean I'm not a professional mathematician but from what professional mathematicians tell me the reasons why they do it and they carry on doing is that there is always that kind of So sort of childlike playfulness

That the subject always contains. Yeah, I mean, I think maths is sort of the ultimate playground to really the ultimate logical playground Is there a character type Richard that goes into mathematics? Where would you even come across a wolf? Just leave it could be a wild boar your wild boars are gonna be a goat totally changes the vicious well it's not gonna be a go crocodile a crocodile you're saying it's ridiculous he's got a wolf? Why would he have a crocodile? They should have just traveled separately and this would be funny. We had a lot of feedback to that episode and it's probably, I would say, one of the most furious rows that Brian and I have had, certainly one of the most furious rows we've had about a wolf and a cabbage. And I think in the end we decided the best thing

to do was just build a bigger boat. Anyway, the idea of gambling led us to thinking about probability and the notion that many of us completely misunderstand how it works. By many of us again I'll say I do not understand, but Brian probably does. For 17% of us. That's nearly a quarter, isn't it? Yeah. Anyway, when Tim Minchin wants to understand something, he writes a song about it. And then we all learn to, with a rhyme scheme.

You should do more of that, Brian, because you know how to do the ivories and everything, don't you? Well, I could just write a limerick about an event horizon. I think a limerick about an event horizon. There once was a black hole from Shropshire. Oh, you've gone with Shropshire. You were already in a rhyming dictionary quandary at that point as well. This is worse than the wolf cabbage debacle.

Do something about the curvature of space-time instead, I'm sure you'll get away with that. Here are Tim Minchin and Alex Bellofs talking and singing about randomness. You know, I've got a song called If I Didn't Have You, which is about love and the notion of fate and soulmates and stuff. And that's got lyrics in it like, your love is one in a million, you couldn't buy it at any price, but of the 9.99900 thousand other possible loves, statistically some of them would be equally nice. And it also says, I think you're special but you fall within a bell curve. So you know, there's, yeah, quite often I find myself saying what are

the odds in my shows to make the point that they're reasonable. They generally answer that question is like you're one over 27 to the power of 21 or whatever. You can find them eventually. Have you ever written a song and thought this is a great song but it's actually statistically inaccurate and therefore because that's the thing is you are involved and you write about rationalism, you write about science, you write about so you actually go that this is I've got a problem. I can I can correctly rhyme this but this will make it inaccurate. Or... Yeah, there's two things.

One, I do have an obsession with making my songs thorough, which is why they're usually about two minutes longer than is fun. And the other thing is I try to keep myself just stupid enough so that I can justify being stupid. Which isn't to say I need to work so that I can justify being stupid. Which isn't to say I need to work very hard to keep myself that stupid I just mean I try to make it apparent that I'm not actually claiming to know anything. When you talk about working out probability and when you talk about decisions that you can make and rational decisions could you for instance live

your life by going hang on a minute right I'm just going to work out what is the probability that if I take that action that will lead to that and that's the required moment or does it in turn does it become a mathematical exercise in living? I think I do live my life like that. It's in my nature to try to shed any Superstition from any decisions. I actually consciously work on making sure I've got no superstition left The thing I always try to do if a loved one's getting on a plane is say I hope you have a crash You know left. The thing I always try to do if a loved one's getting on a plane is say, I hope you have a crash, you know, just because I like taking control of what is a very difficult instinct. The toughest superstition I've got that I've had to

try to rid myself of is the touchwood superstition. The idea I go, I've never had a car crash. Oh, you know, as if your words can change the universe, but it's so embedded in us that we think we're special. We basically think we're special. I think it's totally fine to have these little superstitions to make people feel better, to be able to fly easier. It's just when you lose all your money because you go gambling, it becomes a problem.

And misunderstanding of probability means that people can be conned really easily and lots of people are conned. Now, there's nothing I enjoy more than a disagreement on Monkey Cage, a scientific row, because they always lead to the best insults. We find ourselves in worlds of spherical idiots. I love spherical idiots. Yeah, my favorite one was Rutherford who said, some officious official at the university, he said, you are like a Euclidean point. You have position but no magnitude. That's pretty, isn't it?

That is, yeah. That's quite widely. What's lovely about some of the insults from scientists is non-scientists don't even realise they've been insulted. Euclidean point? Yeah, so everyone's happy. You've got your revenge and no one's actually necessarily felt the dagger because they didn't understand what the dagger was. Apparently as well, wasn't it? Yeah. So your ideas are so ill-founded that you're not even wrong. Yeah, that's such a great thing. An answer so bad it even fails on being wrong.

It's in an entirely new universe of wrongditude. Anyway, here is a disagreement about coincidence between Tim Minchin, Brian and Alex Belos. Let's see how this fight plays out. Our natural sense of coincidence and probability can mislead us. And you tell the story of the woman who won the lottery in New Jersey twice in four weeks? Yeah, in four months. In four months. So two lottery wins in four months. The newspaper said this was a one in 17 trillion chance of that happening.

And it was a one in trillion chance of any person going and buying one ticket on that day and then going and buying the other ticket. But that's not the way probability works. If there are thousands or millions of people actually buying lottery tickets, it turned out mathematicians did the math on it, so to speak. And the chance of any one person winning two lotteries in America in any four month period is about 25%. I don't have a problem with that lotto example. The lay idiots way I think of that is that there's very very low possibility of thing A happening

but there's loads and loads and loads of things, therefore the probability of anything happening is really really good. In fact, given enough time and enough things the probability of anything happening is really really good. In fact, given enough time and enough things, the probability of anything happening is always one. So any event you can think of will eventually happen like existence of human life and all that sort of stuff. But where... That's not true, that. It violates the laws of physics. That, yeah. Bring out all these laws of physics theories like they really are. Why? Why if time is infinite,

theoretically it's not, but if it was infinite. So you have a law such as the conservation of electric charge which is based on some... I don't have that one. So you can't make a negative charge without a positive charge, which is the way we think the universe works at the moment. So that's why you can only create matter and antimatter in equal amounts, because you need to... If you're going to make some matter with a positive charge, you need to make an equal amount with a negative charge. So that would be an absolute law, then no matter how long you wait... Yes, sorry. No, you're absolutely right. A physically impossible thing won't happen if it's physically impossible.

If there's a possibility that it's not impossible then that will happen. But I guess what I'm saying is all possible events will happen over enough time. Yeah. Precision. Bloody physicists. Can we pack on? This is Radio 4, it's about precision. The listeners won't know this but when Brian was explaining antimatter and matter he was using it both with his fists in as if it were if lock stock and two smoking barrels had been made by the open university. We've got matter over here, antimatter over here and someone I think is about to go from matter to antimatter. Thank you Tim, I am a physicist you are a minstrel we can move on. So how easy is a poker face?

Really easy. You just have to have no internal monologue. That was really impressive as well because when you told me the poker face was really easy you did it with such a stillness that I believe that you really do know how easy a poker face is. There's nothing going on. I can't be certain whether actually you have no idea. Always inscrutable Brian Cox. So to help us learn to lie more effectively, cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott explained to newspaper columnist David Aranovic and Richard Wiseman how we're all natural liars.

Are there other animals that exhibit deceptive behaviour? There are examples. I think sometimes because you're reliant on human observers telling you about these, sometimes these are humans being a little bit romantic about animals like, look at that cheeky little sparrow, she wants to mate with that other sparrow, they've gone hiding, oh yes they're up to something. So you know, it's possible, it might just be some sparrows mating, I mean building deception into that. But there's a theory, quite an interesting theory about primates that says part of what's driven the evolution of very large brains in primates

is the sort of social processing you need to do to lie and to deceive. So if you look broadly across primates, you can see primates with smaller brains tend to deceive each other by kind of, I wanted your water, I'm trying to think of a good way of doing it, I might sort of scream, you look at why I'm screaming and I nick your water. So it's kind of quite basic deception that as you move up, larger brains basically, you find more complex patterns of deception. And when you get to chimpanzees, it really starts to

look pretty human, actually. So you're suggesting that to operate in large social groups, deception is a necessary behavior? Well, potentially, particularly for the large social groups that primates live in, which are very hierarchical. They're not, whatever Russell Brand tells you, they're not large cooperative groups of monkeys who are all sharing a happy life. Does that mean that the highest form of evolution we've achieved so far is Jeffrey Archer?

Yes. It's also related to the question of what age do we start to lie as humans? And there's some lovely studies where you bring kids into the lab and you put them in a room and you say, okay, we're setting up your favorite toy behind you, but don't look. And then you walk out of the room and say, whatever you do, don't look at the toy. And then you watch them with closed circuit TV and after a couple of minutes, they'll look at the toy and then they'll go back again. And then you come back into the room and ask the key question. You say, did you look at the toy and then they'll go back again and then you come back into the room and ask the key question you say did you look at

the toy so you find out whether or not they're prepared to lie you do that with three-year-olds so they've only just really mastered language already 50% of them will lie about looking at the toy you got two years to five-year-olds and I kid you not this is the results there isn't a single five-year-old that will tell the truth so that's why you must never trust your children under any circumstances. In the next episode why being wrong is sometimes right in the infinite monkey's guide to failure. All the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC sounds and you can find all the details of those in the program description for this show.

In the infinite monkey cage Feeling that nice again? From BBC Radio 4 Life can be unexpected. It was big. This was not a wind, this was not a storm, this was a tsunami. But when confronted with change, humans are remarkably resilient. I knew in that moment as I fell to the ground that I would recover more. I'm Dr Sian Williams, psychologist and presenter of Life Changing,

the programme that speaks to people whose worlds have been flipped upside down and transformed in a moment. If I had to live my life again, would I ever want to go through what I went through? There's a very simple answer to that. I would go through it again. Subscribe to Life Changing on BBC Sounds.