科学美国人60秒:Gambling Gave Science Some Lucky Breaks

“It’s not just gamblers using science. In many cases, science has benefited enormously from people studying the house.”
“不仅赌徒会利用科学。在许多情况下，科学会极大受益于研究房子的人群。”

Mathematician Adam Kucharski. He’s the author of the new book The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling.
数学家Adam Kucharski说道。Adam Kucharski是新书《完美的赌注:科学和数学如何影响赌博的运气》的作者。

“Back in the Renaissance, actually, probability theory was developed to study these games. I mean, can you imagine having bets where it’s not actually clear what a fair game is?”
早在文艺复兴时期，人们就研发了概率论来研究这些游戏。我的意思是说，你能想象在自己尚不清楚游戏是否公平时进行下注吗?

For example, in the 17th century the question came up, do you have the same chance of throwing a six by rolling one die four times or of throwing two sixes by rolling two dice 24 times?
例如，在17世纪人们提出这样的问题，投掷一个骰子四次得到一个6，与投掷两个骰子24次得到2个6的概率一样吗?

“That had been around awhile, those kinds of bets and those kinds of questions, and that was Fermat and Pascal who developed a lot of this theory. And one of the crucial things was this concept of an expected value: if you play a game repeatedly what do you expect to win on average? And until you have that kind of theory in place it’s very hard to actually compare two bets directly and work out which one is more preferable.”
这个问题已经存在已久，同样还有类似的赌注以及类似的问题。费尔马和帕斯卡研发了许多这方面的理论。其中至关重要的是概念的期望值：如果你重复玩一个游戏，你的平均期望是什么吗?如果你掌握了这种理论，就会知道对两种赌注进行直接比较、得出哪种方式更可取很难。

Pascal figured out that your chances of throwing one six in four rolls of a die was slightly more than 50 percent. But your odds of two sixes in 24 throws of two dice was slightly less than 50 percent.
帕斯卡尔发现对一个骰子投掷四次得到留个点的几率略大于50%。但是另一种情况的几率却略低于50%。

“And a lot of this theory from probability to statistics and actually more recently things like game theory and chaos theory originated with studying games of chance, so I think science actually has benefitted a lot from people’s curiosity about gambling.”
实际上概率统计理论、博弈理论和混沌理论起源于研究游戏的获胜几率，所以我认为科学受益于人们的赌博好奇心理。”

My full interview with Adam Kucharski about his book The Perfect Bet is at our Web site as a Science Talk podcast.
Adam Kucharski以及其书的全部内容，请参看科学美国人官网站查看科学访谈播客节目。