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                                                     Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Title

:

Computing by Symmetry

 

 

 

Speaker

:

Prof. Bob Li

 

 

Department of Information Engineering and Institute of Network Coding

 

 

CUHK

 

 

 

Date

:

April 8th, 2011 (Friday)

 

 

 

Time

:

2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

 

 

 

Venue

:

Room LT3

 

 

Lady Shaw Building

 

 

CUHK

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Abstract:
 

The popular 2008 movie "21" was based on the story of the MIT Blackjack Team, which won $m’s in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the Bahamas, St. Martin, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Europe, ... in the early 1990s. The Team was formed after my years at MIT (1974-76). They called me up before their magnificent tour and tried to invite me to join, before which time I had not heard of this Team.

 

At an age before Internet, the Team managed to track me down on the opposite side of the earth. Why me?

 

I had a private theory for exponential speed-up in the computation of blackjack probabilities. It applied some algebra of the symmetric group to tree-search computing. I had fun using it at Las Vegas in my younger days. My advantage over the house started at the very first hand after card shuffle. When I released the theory in a 1989 paper in SIAM J. Comput., blackjack was only mentioned as one of the three applications. Clever MIT people saw through the disguise the serious title “Dynamic programming by exchangeability” of the paper.

 

* This talk is from the series of A dialogue between mathematics and engineering

 

No prerequisite from algebra, computing or gambling


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Biography:
 

http://www.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/people/bobli.html


************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

 

 

 

Host

:

Prof. Lam Kai Pui

Tel

:

(852) 2609 8330

Email

:

kplam@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

 

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

 

 

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seem5201

Email

:

seem5201@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

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