Konami Slot Machines Flashing Subliminal Messages? 208
shadowspar writes "A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service after a news investigation revealed that they briefly flash a jackpot result on the screen every time they are played. Konami claims that the 'subliminal' jackpot images are unintentional and the result of a bug, but other US and Canadian jurisdictions are looking at pulling the machines as well."
Re:Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA (Score:2, Informative)
In a case that was reported in Canada, but mostly ignored elsewhere, Yaghi went to officials of the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, who videotaped the consultant winning hundreds of dollars, according to The Edmonton Journal. He turned all the money over to the officials on the spot.
Both Yaghi and the manufacturing company say the software error in the machines allowed millions of dollars of fraudulent gains. At least two people other than Yaghi took advantage of the bug at casinos in the United States and Canada before the software was fixed, the company says.
Yaghi may have erred when he proposed to the company that they hire him as a consultant to find and repair such flaws for a fee of $250,000. The company offered $50,000 instead, which Yaghi declined.
The company then obtained an order from a Canadian court to seize computers from Yaghi's home, persuaded the gaming commission to ban him from Alberta casinos, and filed the $10 million lawsuit.
In response, Yaghi is suing WMS Gaming for $1 million and the gaming commission for $3 million.
it can work... sometimes (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Informative)
Some places even have huge fish tanks as you're exiting, some would say to calm you down after a big loss so you're more likely to come back.
Re:It doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
Joking aside, subliminal priming [google.com] is making a comeback in experimental psychology. It was somewhat discredited in the 60s and 70s (i.e., the urban legend [snopes.com] about theaters flashing "Drink Coke" on movie screens), but more recent work [millisecond.com] has uncovered the parameters and boundaries to make it a viable experimental technique. It is typically used in controlled lab situations to study automatic processing of information in isolation from conscious, intentional thought. It's not entirely clear from the research literature whether it would work in this kind of real-life applied context. But it wouldn't be hard for a casino to do the testing to find out.
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, because here in the US, we don't want to deal with fills (in spite of the comments about Vegas having slots with coins, properties that actually use them are in the minority, and the coin-filled slots are far in the minority even at those properties) so we just use ticket-out; the slots print out tickets with unique barcodes which are linked to a row in a database. The tickets can be inserted into another machine (ticket-in) or they can be redeemed at the cashier's cage or, on properties which have them, a kiosk. Most properties have at least a redemption kiosk that looks like a bill changer, some have a full kiosk with a screen that lets you redeem points and such as well.
Re:not that it's a big deal... (Score:3, Informative)
1. call update() to handle game events, one of them triggers the creation of a new object A
2. call draw() to draw the current game state
3. call update() and only now finalize the initialization of object A now
4. call draw() to redraw the screen again
With that code you would get some object flashing up at some random position. Other easy causes for random flashing could be texture loading that happens in a separate thread, since the game doesn't wait for the texture to be fully loaded, it will use a placeholder texture for the first few frames of a new scene till the real texture is loaded (see for example Halo2 on XBox). If that placeholder texture happens to not be specified the renderer might just use whatever texture is just in memory and so you would get the desired effect of textures appearing in the wrong places. Double buffering can also lead to all kinds of subliminal errors.
So in short, there are plenty of ways to get subliminal errors in game programming, if Konami did this by error or intentionally is of course a different question, but those kind of errors are not that uncommon.
Re:Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:it can work... sometimes (Score:5, Informative)
This has been proven to be fiction.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but certain subliminal effects are quite real.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&scori
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/
The Neurophysiology of Response Competition: Motor Cortex Activation and Inhibition following Subliminal Response Priming
Peter Praamstra and Ellen Seiss
University of Birmingham, UK
Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_Sublim
The neural bases of subliminal priming
Stanislas Dehaene
Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward and
backward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functional
neuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminal
priming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, and
motor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at the
orthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors can
operate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-target
relations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at the
voxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue.
Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the
'priming method').
Slots are based on fraud. (Score:5, Informative)
The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:
Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.
The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.
And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.
If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.
Re:Slots are based on fraud. (Score:5, Informative)
24 stop reels are very rare (never seen them in the real world in fact) because it makes the 12 symbols have to be pretty narrow. 22 stop is the standard although 18 stop was used from time to time. Virtual reels were commonly 72 stop. 32 stop doesn't extend the odds enough to be very useful and it also doesn't give you enough granularity between positions. You can go higher than 72 of course. I saw a math model for an IGT Five Times Pay that used a 90 stop virtual reel and one for a Triple Triple Diamond that used a 200 stop virtual reel. Those were 92% payout games if I remember rightly. I was told Quartermania used 255 stop virtual reels but I never personally saw math for it.
As a general point for people I'd like to say that there are indeed several techniques the machines use that are not commonly known, but all slot machine behaviour is VERY heavily regulated by law. If you want to know what they can and cannot do, look at the statutes. Ironically basically all the things people think the machines do are illegal and therefore not done.
Re:Watch it yourself! (Score:1, Informative)
He uses standard magic tricks, plants and actors just like every other magician. He just pretends that he doesn't.
NLP (Neuro linguistic programming) and all the other crap he talks about is complete and utter shite. It is psuedoscience. It doesn't work and doesn't exist.
He is a magician and nothing more.
If you believe he really can do the things he says he can (on his heavily edited tv specials), then I have a bridge to sell you.
More likely a bug than intentional (Score:1, Informative)