Maths Cannot Predict Roulette Numbers, Says Expert

Number-crunching can only take roulette players so far, it has been claimed.

The final movements of a roulette ball are too erratic for players to accurately predict where it will land, according to a maths expert.

In response to a reader's question about Derren Brown's recent TV roulette stunt, the Evening Chronicle's Dr Maths explained how some mathematicians and physicists have spent years trying to beat the roulette wheel.

Although an understanding of the mechanics of the ball's movement when spinning can provide important clues to its ultimate resting place, this alone is not enough, according to the newspaper's numbers guru.

"In the final stages of the ball's movement it becomes erratic, bouncing this way and that. These final moments of movement are random," he explained.

This means that an analysis of statistics can be used to produce "a range of possible landing places", but can never offer 100 per cent accuracy.

The game of roulette is thought to have been invented by Blaise Pascal, who devised a primitive form of the wheel while attempting to create a perpetual motion machine in 17th-century France.