How to Win the Deception / Counter- deception Arms Race? Simon Henderson April 2021 Version 1.0 © 2021 Simon Henderson Deception By Design How to Win the Deception/Counter-deception Arms Race? How to Win the Deception/ 2003). And while law enforcement did eventually catch up with Marcus, he was never convicted. Counter-deception Arms Race? The Savannah Move involves placing a $5000 chip under a small stack of $5 chips on one of the 2:1 column bets. The stack slants slightly Simon Henderson towards the dealer so that they cannot see the April 2021 $5000 chip located on the bottom of the pile. If the ball lands on a winning number, then the player Acknowledgements enthusiastically claims the win. Replaying the moments leading up to the win on CCTV reveals no Cover photo of adult reed warbler feeding cuckoo cheating, as the play is entirely legitimate and no chick, by Per Harald Olsen (edited). CC BY-SA 3.0 cheating has occurred. Introduction However, if the ball lands on a losing number, the player will act as if intoxicated and clumsily “Creativity may well be the last legal unfair make a show of removing their losing chips from competitive advantage we can take to run the table (an illegal action known as pinching or over the competition.” dragging). When the dealer demands that the player returns their chips to the table, the player covertly Dave Trott, Advertiser, and author of exchanges the $5000 chip for a $5 chip before Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in replacing the stack on the table. The exchange Out-Thinking the Competition (Trott, tends to pass undetected by the dealer as their 2013) attention is naturally directed towards the winning areas of the table (that need to be monitored for Usually, people cheat in casinos to win. In the early pastposting). So far as the dealer is concerned, the 1990s, Richard Marcus literally turned the tables on replaced stack appears to correspond exactly with Roulette by only cheating when he had already lost. the original stack, even when reviewed on CCTV. By only cheating when he lost, Marcus turned the One of Roulette’s cardinal rules is that players are casino’s process for detecting deception against forbidden from placing chips onto the table after them. The very surveillance system designed the dealer has called “no more bets” ahead of the to protect the casino from cheating was now ball dropping from the wheel rim into the rotor. protecting the cheats. Late bets, known as pastposting, involve sneaking additional chips onto a known winning number and The revelation of the Savannah Move, designed to are illegal. defeat technology, spurred the development of a vast array of new technologies that now invisibly In the 1980s, casinos replaced aerial walkways and monitor, track, record, profile, and anticipate one-way mirrored roofs with eye-in-the-sky security players’ behaviours, and flag automatically any cameras installed in the ceiling above each table. suspected cheating. As a consequence, the The ability to record games and replay the moments Savannah Move no longer works. Radio Frequency leading up to a big win revolutionised casino Identification (RFID) chips inside the gaming chips security and put an end to many forms of cheating, now enable casinos to know: including pastposting. However, the introduction of anti-cheating technologies inadvertently pushed • The amount of money in play on a table. cheating in a new direction. A direction that • How and when chips flow between the targeted the primary remaining vulnerability in table, the cage, and the casino’s safe. casino security — human sensemaking. • How and when chips are cashed-out by In the early 1990s, Richard Marcus, a prolific casino players. cheat (who later became a gaming protection • Where and when players leave the casino consultant) developed a deceptive play known as with uncashed chips. The Savannah Move. From 1995-2000, Marcus and his team used the move on Roulette tables across Of course, this battle between cheaters and casinos the United States, stealing more than $5M. Casinos only continues to escalate, and cheaters are now only became aware of the move when Marcus developing approaches to decode, clone, and exposed it in his book American Roulette (Marcus, exploit casinos’ RFID systems. deceptionbydesign.com 1 © 2021 Simon Henderson How to Win the Deception/Counter-deception Arms Race? This adversarial competition embodies a range • Developers of malware versus developers of interesting processes that we will now explore of anti-malware systems. further. • Viruses versus vaccine developers. • Deep-fake generators versus deep-fake Competing Innovation Cycles detection systems. Nature evolves through competition, and survival • Bank robbers versus bank security system of the fittest often equates to survival of the most designers. deceptive. In any competition, the ability to fool your adversaries creates competitive advantage • Moths (that have evolved to generate that increases dramatically your chances of disruptive ultrasonic clicks) versus bats survival. And for the targets of deception, survival (that use ultrasonic echolocation to detect depends upon the evolution of reciprocal counter- and hunt their prey). deception capabilities. • Traders versus financial regulators. In many arenas where actors seek to establish • Bot developers versus identity superiority over their adversaries, similar authentication designers. cyclical behaviours play out repeatedly. The first • Advertisers versus trading standards competitor develops or discovers the means regulators. to gain an advantage over their rivals. When a second competitor becomes aware of this, they will • Art forgers versus art authenticators. respond by: • Magicians versus exposers on YouTube. • Copying or matching the first competitor’s • Parasites (Serratia Marcescens) versus source of advantage. fruit flies (Drosophila) that, when infected, • Developing a countermeasure that negates recombine their DNA during mating to the first competitor’s advantage. prevent future parasites from targeting their offspring. • Changing the conditions upon which the first competitor’s advantage depends — • Aircraft stealth designers versus radar for example, by successfully appealing designers. to a higher authority to have the first • Smugglers versus customs officers. competitor’s new advantage ruled illegal. • Etc. • Buying-out and acquiring the first competitor’s advantage. Deceptive arms races can be found in a wide variety of different competitive environments. • Developing their own competitive Note that these races are all asymmetric — one advantage that outweighs the first side tries to deceive the other, while the other side competitor’s advantage. tries to avoid being deceived. As Richard Dawkins The first competitor will respond by developing (Dawkins, 1996) has noted, asymmetric arms races a counter to the countermeasure, or by creating tend to create more complex adversarial systems: an alternative means to gain further advantage. Often, these arms races have no finish line, “Cheetahs are trying to eat gazelles. and the escalatory cycle only stops when one Gazelles are not trying to eat cheetahs, they competitor exhausts their money, resources, time, are trying to avoid being eaten by cheetahs. or motivation, and no longer has the capacity to From an evolutionary point of view compete. asymmetric arms races are more interesting, since they are more likely to generate highly Survival therefore depends upon who can adapt complex weapons systems.” most rapidly, innovate most effectively, and make the greatest leaps ahead of the competition. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Successful deception creates a step change Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals in competitive advantage, so it is perhaps not a Universe Without Design. (Dawkins, surprising that a deception/counter-deception arms 1996, p.185). race arises naturally in many adversarial settings. For example, consider: In this article, I will detail examples of the deception/counter-deception arms in sport, the military, and nature. I will then draw together deceptionbydesign.com 2 © 2021 Simon Henderson How to Win the Deception/Counter-deception Arms Race? emergent lessons about how deception can be jersey. Other players would run at the opposition used to gain and sustain competitive advantage in while miming carrying the ball, enabling the real other settings. ball carrier (who appeared to be empty-handed) to run down the field unopposed. At the time, the rulebook did not explicitly identify this tactic as Deception in Sport illegal. However, officials soon ruled that the play Sport is a rich source for studying the deception/ was unsportsmanlike and made it illegal. counter-deception arms race, as individuals, teams, and organisations seek continuously to develop For a game against Harvard University, Warner techniques, tactics, and technologies to beat the ‘inverted’ the hidden-ball strategy by sewing leather competition and win. Sport is heavily characterised football-shaped patches onto the front of his by mimesis (social copying and emulation) and any players’ jerseys. Every team member who held their innovation is soon recognised and replicated by hands in front of their torso appeared to be carrying the competition. This soon erodes the advantage the ball, making it impossible for the opposition to and, ultimately, levels the playing field. Often, the identify the real ball carrier. Once again, officials bodies governing a sport may update the sport’s soon ruled this