Horse Racing with the Commodore 64 Other books for Commodore 64 users Football Pools with the Commodore 64 Frank George o 00 383069 1 Commodore 64 Wargaming Owen Bishop and Audrey Bishop o 00 383010 1 Business Systems on the Commodore 64 Susan Curran and Margaret Norman o 246 12422 9 Commodore 64 Computing Ian Sinclair o 246 12030 4 Commodore 64 Disk Systems and Printers Ian Sinclair o 246 12409 1 Commodore 64 Graphics and Sound Steve Money o 246 12342 7 Software 64: Practical Programs for the Commodore 64 Owen Bishop o 246 12266 8 Introducing Commodore 64 Machine Code Ian Sinclair o 246 12338 9 40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64 Vince Apps o 246 12318 4 The Commodore 64 ROMs Revealed Nick Hampshire o 00 383087 X Advanced Commodore 64 BASIC Revealed Nick Hampshire o 00 383088 8 i ~. Horse Racing with the Commodore 64 Frank George A COLLINS 8 Grafton Street, London WI Collins Professional and Technical Books William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 8 Grafton Street, London WIX 3LA First published in Great Britain by Collins Professional and Technical Books 1985 Distributed in the United States of America by Sheridan House, Inc. Copyright © Frank George 1985 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data George, F. H. Horse racing with the Commodore 64 1. Computer games 2. Commodore 64 (Computer)- Programming I. Title 794.8'028'5404 GV1469.2 ISBN 0-00-383180-9 Typeset by V & M Graphics Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham, Kent All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Other books for Commodore 64 Users Football Pools with the Commodore 64 Frank George o 00 383069 I Commodore 64 Wargaming Owen Bishop and Audrey Bishop o 00 383010 I Commodore 64 Disk Systems and Printers Ian Sinclair o 246 12409 I Commodore 64 Graphics and Sound Steve Money o 246 12342 7 Contents Acknowledgements vi Using This Book Vll 1 Getting to Know the Commodore 64 2 Welcome to the Track! 13 3 Introduction to Betting 17 4 Introduction to Forecasting 28 5 An Analysis of Horse Racing 57 6 Alternative Forecasting Systems 72 7 Staking 100 8 Racing All Over the W orId II8 9 Conclusions 134 Appendix I: Probability Table 137 Appendix II: Weight for Age Allowances 138 Appendix III: Age, Weight and Distance Table 139 Appendix IV: Scale of Weight for Age for Steeplechases and Hurdle Races 140 Appendix V: Statistical Matters 141 Appendix VI: Miscellaneous Information 143 Appendix VII: Glossary of Racing Terms 149 Appendix VIII: References 156 Index 161 Acl<nowledgements I would like to acknowledge the help I have received from various sources in writing this book, especially my elder daughter, Mrs Clare Smith, and my wife, for their helpful suggestions. My younger daughter Karen is a show jumper with two racehorses of her own, and her knowledge of horses has been a great help. Thanks are also due to Mr John Maris of Poringware, who supplied listings for the H series programs and the SORT programs, and to Bisprint of Commerce House, High Street, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks for the remaining listings. Bisprint have produced cassette and disk versions of the H I and H3 programs which are obtainable from the above address. I also wish to thank Mr Allan Scott for his most detailed editing of the text, especially those parts dealing with the Commodore 64. Also I would like to acknowledge help, including permission to publish excerpts from the Handicap Book and Sporting Life, from Mr Len Bell and Mr Ossie Fletcher. F.H. George Using This Bool( This book has two main purposes. I t will help you to understand the systems involved in horse racing and betting, and it will provide you with the information and programs you need to make computer-assisted forecasts of the results of individual races. The main programs, HI (Horse racing number one) and H3, are fully described in Chapters 4 and 6. Of the two, H3 seems to work slightly better in practice, though both have proved very successful. However, much depends on the amount and source of your information, so the book also includes modified versions of the H3 program to cope with particular circumstances. As well as the horse racing programs themselves, this book includes detailed advice on betting (very important if you aim to make a healthy profit) and on the care and feeding of your Commodore 64 computer. Chapter 1, read in conjunction with the Commodore manual, should provide all necessary information for those who have never used a home micro before. If you are already familiar with home micros you may be tempted to turn straight to Chapter 4 (or Chapter 6) and start keying the programs into your computer. Resist the temptation, at least until you have read Chapter 1. With the Commodore, a mistake at the keying stage can spell total disaster­ Chapter I will show you how to avoid disaster altogether. l Chapter One Getting to Know the Commodore 64 If you are interested in a book called Horse Racing with the Commodore 64 then you probably know something either about horse racing or about computers. Since it is less likely that you know something about computers, I'll begin by introducing computers in general and the Commodore 64 in particular. If you're familiar with home computers already you could, in theory, skip this chapter altogether. In practice, though, you will find it well worth your while to read at least the section dealing with keying in programs. I can guarantee that a thorough reading of this section will save you a good deal of grief and heartache when you come to Chapters 4 and 6! However, for those whose idea of a computer may still be coloured by Star Trek and the galactic fantasies of George Lucas, a few words about the humble home micro. What is a computer? This is not such a silly question as it sounds. Some people seem to think it's a cross between Robbie the Robot and Attila the Hun, a sort of electronic dictator ruling every aspect of our lives with a ruthless disregard for humanity. That's probably because their bank statements arrive on computer printouts: they should learn to appreciate the difference between mindless machines and pitiless machine users. It isn't 'the computer' that issues overdraft notices, it's your bank manager- the computer just tells him that your account has gone into the red, which is about as mysterious as getting a minus number on your pocket calculator. And if one of the bank clerks makes a mistake, and debits your account for £3000 that someone else has drawn out, you can't expect the computer to know the difference any more than your calculator would. It's true that some very large computers at the frontiers of research are self-programming and can even program each other. It's even true that some computers appear to behave 'intelligently'. The key word is 'appear'. Any computer, even a self-programming one, has been built and programmed in the first instance by human beings, and none of the workaday computers currently in use in homes and offices 2 Horse Racing with the Commodore 64 Table 1.1. Binary and decimal numbers compared. Notice the relationship between 'round' numbers in binary and powers of 2. Binary and decimal equivalents Bin Dec Bin Dec I I 1001 9 10 2 21 1010 10 II 3 lOll I I 100 4 22 II 00 12 101 5 1101 13 110 6 I I 10 14 III 7 I II I 15 1000 8 23 10000 16 24 ... throughout the world is at anything like this 'state of the art'. Only human beings can make a computer do things - and this book is about what you can do with a Commodore 64 to help yourself become more successful as a horse racing punter. So back to the original question: what is a computer? Essentially a computer is a collection of switches- thousands of them. Each switch can be either 'on' or 'off - if you like, at '0' or at 'I '. It's perfectly possible to count using just these two numbers (see Table 1.1). Because it has only two digits, such a system is called binary. Our standard way of counting, with ten digits, is called decimal. Incidentally, the word 'digit', meaning a number, actually derives from the Latin word for finger. No wonder we like counting in tens! The computer uses these binary digits, or bits, in groups of eight known as bytes. (This passes for humour in computer circles.) As you can see from Table I. I, there is a close relationship between 'round numbers' like 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 in the binary system and powers of2 in decimal: 2 is written as 10,2 X 2 (22) as 100, and so on. As it happens, 210 is 1024 (decimal) which is very close to 1000, so we call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. The Commodore 64 is so called because it has 64 kilobytes (K) of memory, i.e. 65536 bits. These are 65536 switches, all ready to store, in number-coded form, the information you put into the computer. How does a computer work? Fortunately we don't need to answer this question in any great detail- just in broad outline.