"It's not just gamblers using science. In many cases, science has benefited enormously from people studying the house." Mathematician Adam Kucharski. He's the author of the new book The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of 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 of throwing a six by rolling one die four times or of throwing two sixes by rolling two dice 24 times? "That had been around awhile, those kinds of bets and those kinds of questions, and that was Fermat 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 game peaceably.