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."
Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry, it's Monday and I definitely wish I could UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA my job right now. I used to think that this cheat code (or things like the game genie) were detrimental to youthful minds thinking that you just needed to figure out the trick to life and everything was over. I used to think that they would grow up expecting everything to be easy once you were "in on it" and that this would be bad and they would never understand that life is much more complicated. But, you know what? I sadly see more and more everyday that it's a matter of knowing what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA to tell your boss to make him/her think you know what's going on. Or what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA you tell someone to befriend them to hook you up with a position/help. And then it's to the pharmacy where you're given more UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA in pill form because your doctor (of which there are thousands of kinds) tells you you need it. Notice the tangents my brain flies off on when it's Monday.
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A manufacturer of computerized gambling equipment, WMS Gaming, of Chicago, earlier this year sued Edmonton, Alberta, software consultant Zues Yaghi for $10 million after he showed the company and Canadian authorities a "back door" he'd discovered in the company's casino slot machines.
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.
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UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBAstart
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Do I need my ocarina equipped for this first?
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I live in Japan; I wonder if the Konami machines here do the same thing, and if so, what kind of regulation they have?
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Re:Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA (Score:4, Funny)
It doesn't work (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It doesn't work (Score:5, Funny)
Please, I don't have any mod points, but something tells me this post really needs top moderation.
it can work... sometimes (Score:3, Informative)
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Not out of the question, actually. If the machine is coded to start at slot indeces 0,0,0,0,0, or they bring an image of the wheel up before they actually initialize the variables (which I would assume to be wiped to 0 by default), it could simply be displaying a neutral uninitialized state. And what would be the most important number on the wheel, which you would start with when programming it?
Jackpot's are probably all the first position on
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IME, .25 sec is quite enough to register even more than just a name - say, full two lines of text, i.e. in a subtitle.
The same thing as wheels spinning backwards, though I don't know what's that effect called in English...
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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').
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Most people can do that if there's a blank screen or neutral stimulus afterwards, but can you do that even if a post-stimulus mask is applied?
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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.
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Joking aside, I'd love to see[1] some subliminal advertising in movie theaters.
I've come to see the bloody movie; all you can accomplish by giving me 20 minutes of ads beforehand is a vow never ever to buy anything advertised in cinemas.
Well, that and loss of revenue, since I'm sure not going to pay money to watch the movie after 20 minutes of commercials when I can download it and watch it for free. Boo hoo, I steal your virtual money. Piss off, your commercials are stealing my real time.
Anyway, though
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...to convince the attractive female test subjects to sleep with the nerdy male testers. Or was that Revenge of the Nerds XVII?
Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who needs subliminal advertising when the shortcut to riches is so ingrained into the psyche that this mere promise was enough to supply a city with excess revenue for over half a century before they decided to change gears into an entertainment destination?
I do, however, welcome our subliminal jackpot bearing one armed robotic masters/bandits.
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Funny)
What's superliminal, you ask? "HEY YOU, GAMBLE!"
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow, you found a casino that's still using coins in slots?
Gambling was probably a part of humanity
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Well, considering it's a Canadian story, and we have $1 and $2 coins rather than bills, it's not really ALL that surprising, is it?
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.
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How large are the barcodes ?
How often can invalid barcodes be tried before someone comes out to check on them ?
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I don't have a ticket handy but they're pretty long. AFAIK the machine will keep letting you try the ticket. However, the machines are all in locations where they can be monitored not only by people on the floor, but also by surveillance. Casinos have more cameras per cubic foot than probably anywhere else on the planet.
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Do theese machines check for a ticket pattern, only the barcode pattern, is there a time delay ?
Barcodes are always the same width, but are theese barcodes a constant height or do they vary slightly ?
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When inserting tickets into slots, you can insert as many as you like up to the maximum. I don't know what that is, and it may be configurable (but may also be mandated per jurisdiction.) When inserting tickets into kiosks, they tend to pay off on it immediately.
I believe they look for more than the barcode, but frankly I do n
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If there's no pause, & it acknowledges theese areas any time they're seen, it might be possible to craft brute force tickets that are just large enough so that the eye in the sky doesn't notice the difference, but still allow more space to print this info.
If I can print a ticket that's 4 inches long & the scanner only requires 1/16th of an inch worth of information & there's no tim
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I see what you're saying. There is indeed a time delay - it's probably built right into the bill reader unit itself. You have to wait a moment after paper is rejected before you can insert another. Also the barcode reader would almost certainly not have the resolution to pick up a barcode that short.
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Do you guys use wireless communications anywhere ?
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Sure, but none of it is connected to the network that handles any of the gaming.
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That would be kinda scary in either situation.
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Like anything else, some customers love it and some hate it. Regardless, besides the work issue, it is also more sanitary. Also you don't have issues with little old ladies dropping their bucket of quarters and being all irate if you don't find every quarter they think was in their cup :)
It is true, though, that casinos are always trying to give you less and make you think you're getting more... But at the same time, they do have a
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There's a funny story which I think is attributed to John Scarne, who, back in the old days, was often called in by casinos as a gambling consultant. One of the heavy slots players he interviewed was complaining to Scarne that "these slots just never pay!" Scarne replied, "Sure they do. They pay for the lights, the food, the entertainment, the dealers..."
--Rob
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Might I suggest backgammon [bkgm.com]? It's a wonderful game of manipulating probabilities and making expected value estimations, with enough random chance to keep it exciting.
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How long before some rips off the ticket system for a lot of money?
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I'm not privy to the details of the ticket system - When I've attended conferences etc I've been paying attention to other aspects of the program (in this case Aristocrat OASIS) like the pit ratings, the back end, etc. On one hand I like to know all I can, on the other hand some of this stuff is mind-numbingly boring and I go and learn what I need to learn and then get the hell out and go drink somewhere. (I'm not a gambler - when I go to c
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They might stupidly be using a sequential numbering system so you could theoretically rip off another customer by getting a ticket and then making another ticket with a slightly higher number.
But you probably would need to lug around a customized ticket printer- possibly with customized tickets- possibly with
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can confirm the first paragraph and deny the second paragraph of your report. It does use a centralized database. It does not use sequential numbers, at least not in clear - they are at minimum obfuscated in some way. But I suspect they're guaranteed unique and psuedorandom.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/grap
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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.
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Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Subliminal? What about overt? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Safety isn't bad, as there are exit signs everywhere for the emergency exits. The issue is finding the one you came in from, which makes it harder to go home. But if there was a fire, you'd just head out the nearest marked emergency exit door and find yourself outside, without a clue
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I was just in Vegas over Christmas [lazylightning.org] and the only place that I saw with a fish tank was well off the strip and had exits closer to the Casino than where the tank was located.
That said, everything else you mentioned is true and while I am not a gambler, I do constantly think about the flashing lights and sounds (even though they are annoying in any other location) and how
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It's not just that, they also custom tune all those noises from each of various games so that they merge together into an comfortable, enjoyable sound, as opposed to sounding like chaos (such as your typical Chuck E. Cheese arcade).
subliminal, liminal, superliminal (Score:5, Funny)
Re:subliminal, liminal, superliminal (Score:5, Funny)
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Agreed - the likelihood of this being a "bug" seems monumentally remote. How could a "draw screen" routine keep accidentally writing a screen that it is least likely of every drawing? Did they optimize by doing a call to displayJackpot() on every screen flip just in case it's that one in a billion or so times that it actually needs to?
To state the obvious, the reason for this screen is starting in the poor gambler
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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 o
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Older machines (Score:2)
All your pizzas are belong to us? (Score:2, Funny)
Oooh! Just like the sexual shrimp inthe print ads! (Score:3, Interesting)
What's really interesting in casinos is the soundscape. Most sound just settles into a constant wash of beeps and talking and mechanical noise.
Except for the sound of coin hitting the payout tray under the slot machine. That has a pitch and timbre so striking and unique that it jumps out at you every time.
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The payout trays are basically large hollow bells, specifically engineered to give the sharpest, clearest, most distinctive sound possible at the drop of every coin.
I think that may be on the way out. I was in Vegas last year, and the slots are almost all paper now. You put in dollars or coins, and, if you win, get paid in a printed receipt that you bring to the cashier. The receipts also have a bar code so you can put it in another machine. Much better for the old biddies instead of lugging around bucke
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The slot parlor in my city has a background sound of the familliar quarter-based jackpot payout to give the place the familliar casino sound
Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Key is hilarious (Score:5, Funny)
One of the examples in his book is a Playboy centerfold of a beautiful blonde reclining on some silky sheets. The brilliant Mr. Key discovered that if you hold the page up to the light so that the printing on the back shows through, and look carefully at the folds of the sheets in a lower corner of the photo, you can kinda-sorta see the letters "s e x".
I read that and thought: How naive of the rest of us to think the sexiness was due to something as obvious as a large, clear photo of a beautiful naked woman, when the real secret was three fuzzy letters in the corner that can't even be seen under normal magazine reading conditions! In other words, the guy's a loon.
Re:Oooh! Just like the sexual shrimp inthe print a (Score:2)
I don't know about that, but your subject line reminded me of a completely different experiment about hiding the obvious. Subjects were shown a scene where there were a number of people, one of whom was doing something repetitive. (I can't remember what.) They were asked to count the number of times he performed the action (which required concentration). Halfway through the scene, someone entered w
Hey! (Score:2)
They say it's a software glitch... (Score:3, Insightful)
A what province? (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary is too afraid to actually reference the actual province, for fear that no one would recognize it??? It is actually the biggest one, Ontario, with 12,000,000+ people. Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.
Sorry, but surely such condescending summaries aren't warranted here...
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>Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.
>Sorry, but surely such condescending summaries
>aren't warranted here...
Um
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No, it's just that once they said "Canada" they knew everyone would lose interest so there was no point adding useless detail.
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I think subconsciously, we United Statsians mentally block out Canada's existence ( on many maps Alaska looks like its an island) to salve the pains of our failure to liberate the northern part of the continent from the British imperialists back in 1812.
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Malarkey! (Score:2)
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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.
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Interesting to note that I'm in Manitoba, Canada, and the "Responsible Gaming Center" in our Casinos will disclose that there are certain symbols on the physical reel that are not hittable. Time to look into our legislation on the subject...
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The reason that virtual reels were invented is because mechanical slot machines can only have a limited number of symbols on a reel due to physical limitations such as the size of the reel or the stepper motors that spin the reels. Let's say that number of symbols is 20. For a 3 reel machanical slot machine, that
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It's also inappropriate for you to "call BS" - a
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Watch it yourself! (Score:3, Interesting)
I guarantee it will blow you away.
To save you the trouble: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=derre
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But you honestly can't deny some of his other "tricks" or "magic" employing NLP, suggestion, misdirection and pyschology.
His strenght is that he very often actually reveals how he did it. And when you realize how he did it, you know that there is much more in it than just "magic" or whatever catch-it-all word you label it. I actually did some of the simpler stuff he did, and yes it is hard to pull off, yes you need suggest
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It's just inside a 3-inch long horizontal slot on the front of the machine. You have to trigger it using the right sized piece of paper. Like most secret codes, it'll take you quite a few tries to get it right...
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Also WMS used to put all kinds of eggs in there pin's and vid's so you may find cool stuff in there video poker and there slots games.
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The nevada gaming commission also has the full source code to all slot games.