In the end, the book concluded, Eudaemonia wasn’t a goal to be attained, but a journey. One of them published a book about their adventures called The Eudaemonic Pie. The Eudaemons wasted several years and thousands of dollars before abandoning the project in the early 1980s. At field tests in Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas casinos, the computer shorted out or overheated, zapping the wearer or burning their skin.

His device used a hidden buzzer that told the wearer which of eight sections, or “octants,” the ball would likely drop into. Like Thorp before him, Farmer learned that roulette was more predictable than anyone imagined, and also that making the science work amid the sweat and noise of a real casino was almost impossible. He and his partners called their venture Eudaemonic Enterprises, after Aristotle’s term for the fulfilling sensation of a life well lived.

Farmer dreamed of creating a utopian community of hippie inventors funded by gambling profits. Doyne Farmer, a physics student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, took up the challenge.