Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

110 страница из 137

***

In 1962, a Californian mathematics professor by the name of Edward Thorp published a book entitled Beat the Dealer, in which he applied advances in probability theory to the game of blackjack. His method assigned a value to each card in the deck and required remembering the value of cards that had been played. In simple terms, when the value of the remaining cards in the deck implies favourable odds, the gambler should increase his or her bet sizes to profit from this statistical advantage. The book was a sensation and inspired legions of card counters seeking their fortunes in Las Vegas. Thorp's work on probability to validate his method involved a large number of mathematical calculations that were carried out on an IBM 704, the first mass produced computer. This machine required calculations to be inputted on punch cards and, by today's standards, was painfully slow. Nevertheless, the dawn of the computer age was a critical development that allowed derivatives to take off, for it enabled complex mathematical calculations to be solved quickly and accurately.