To do so they tend to use established back-end companies rather than reinventing the roulette wheel.

ECONOMIST: Log on, ante up

If you roll the roulette wheel, try to get out of the trade before your losses get over 10%-15%.

FORBES: Looking At Options On A Day Of Strange Confessions From O.J. To Google

This means that you have to be willing to put some money down on one number on the roulette wheel.

FORBES: 12 Things You Must Know About Investing Right Now

New Orleans real estate seems as risky as a spin of the roulette wheel at one of the Gulf Coast's casinos.

FORBES: Gambling On New Orleans

If the roulette wheel of genetics lands on our number, and we get a beneficial mutation, our descendants are likely to thrive and reproduce.

FORBES: Arguing Over Junk: Scientists Attack Each Other as Media Flub 'DNA Story of the Year'

Using those simple measurements and the equations presented in the paper, the researchers were able to predict which half of the roulette wheel the ball would end up in about 59% of the time.

FORBES: Scientists Beat The House At Roulette With Chaos Theory

And to get in on the action, investors are acting like gamblers in Macau, standing six-deep at the roulette wheel and throwing chips over the heads of those in front so that they land on a number on the table.

FORBES: Is Sino-Forest a Sino-Fraud?

As its name suggests, this spins the software equivalent of a roulette wheel to generate a random tree, then examines how snugly the branches of that tree fit the modern foliage.

ECONOMIST: The evolution of language: Babel or babble? | The

In a world of multiple connections, where the distribution of future probabilities cannot be known (unlike the probabilities involved when spinning a roulette wheel), simple rules of thumb may be more useful than sophisticated models.

ECONOMIST: Simple rules may be best for monitoring banks

They were able to model the motion of the wheel and ball and were able to confirm their predictions both in simulation and using an actual roulette wheel.

FORBES: Scientists Beat The House At Roulette With Chaos Theory