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　　“It's not just gamblers using science.

　　In many cases, science has benefited enormouslyfrom people studying the house.”

　　Mathematician Adam Kucharski.

　　He's the author of the new book The PerfectBet:How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Outof Gambling.

　　“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?”

　　For example, in the 17th century the question came up, do you have the same chance ofthrowing a six by rolling one dice four times or of throwing two sixes by rolling two dice 24times?

　　“That had been around awhile, those kinds of bets and those kinds of questions, and that wasFermat 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 gamerepeatedly 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 betsdirectly and work out which one is more preferable.”

　　Pascal figured out that your chances of throwing one six in four rolls of a die was slightly morethan 50 percent.

　　But your odds of two sixes in 24 throws of two dice was slightly less than 50 percent.

　　“And a lot of this theory from probability to statistics and actually more recently things likegame theory and chaos theory originated with studying games of chance, so I think scienceactually has benefitted a lot from people's curiosity about gambling.”

　　My full interview with Adam Kucharski about his book The Perfect Bet is at our Web site as aScience Talk podcast.