Biography
Between 1976 and 1981, he worked with fellow graduate students in Santa Cruz, California, forming the Eudaemons collective with J. Doyne Farmer and others, to develop a strategy for beating the roulette wheel using a toe-operated computer. The computer could, in theory, predict in what area a roulette ball would land on a wheel, giving the player a significant statistical advantage over the house. Although the project itself was a success, they ran into great practical difficulty employing the technique on-site in Las Vegas casinos, and many of the members left to pursue other fields of academia. The experiences of Norman, Doyne Farmer, and crew were later chronicled in the book The Eudaemonic Pie (1985) by Thomas Bass. Their experience was also chronicled on the television series "Breaking Vegas."
Around the same time, he formed the Dynamical Systems Collective with friends Rob Shaw, Doyne Farmer, and James Crutchfield. The collective was best known for its work in probing chaotic systems for signs of order.
In 1982, Packard left Santa Cruz for France to take a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. He left after one year and joined the Institute for Advanced Study. At the IAS, he worked with Stephen Wolfram and friend Rob Shaw to explain cellular automata and the tendency for matter to organize itself.
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