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How Technology has evolved the Online Casino Industry?

Hello everyone, welcome to today article which we are going to have a look at how technology has evolved the online casino industry. Some of you might be having knowhow on what casino industry is and some might be having partial or no knowledge at all. So, we are going to start with simple things as we advance our topic of discussion further. You should also have a look at the Technology behind Online Casinos.

Definition of the global casino industry

The global casino industry is an industry that is made of facilities that involves predictions of outcomes of the final result that will be obtained after an invent has passed. The predictions are made before the event has started. It is made up of the gambling activities such as the gaming machines and the table wagering boards. it is also a common thing for some of these facilities to provide dinning, lodging and the beverage services to their customers. This industry has evolved to an online modernized activity. The online facility has become the most used one especially in this era of corona virus where lockdowns have really affected the physical appearances in the normal global casinos. Online facilities have offered players and bookies a very momentous offer where they can play the game at any place of their comfort.

The first online casino which was referred to as Inter-casino was launched in 1996 and at this time nobody had an idea of what awaited the casino industry. Bookies never thought that one day the industry would evolve to what it is today. Currently, the online casino industry is worthy over 45 billion US dollars something that is still forcing more investors to put their capital in this new area of business and entertainment. You can imagine after the launch of the first online casino industry, in the same month, there was a raise in the number to 15 and a year later, more than 150 online casinos had been launched. Actually, this was the area where investors had started seeing some great potential.

Since the industry crossed the one billion net worth mark in 1998, there have been new inventions and innovations that have led to drastic change and growth in the online casino industry. More technological advances have been made which has led to more players feeling comfortable in joining the industry. This article will focus on how technology has impacted on the online casino industry.

Multiple payment options

Multiple payment option is one of the areas that have greatly improved the online casino industry. Players can now deposit and withdraw money from sites within seconds. This payment systems introduction has lowered the cost incurred by clients and also fastened the process. Several cashless payment methods have also hit the market. These payment methods such as PayPal, Skrill, mobile money and Wire Transfer, etc have impacted greatly on how customers receive their winnings from the booking sites. You can check on OBLG to take note of all the casinos that offers their payment through PayPal which is the most commonly used universal payment methods by the majority of the bookies especially in Europe and America. Moreover, because of this online payment system, casinos also offer no deposit free spins offers, in order to attract customers.

Although landless betting has a limited amount that a client can play with, the online casino has offered a lot of options that can be used in the process and this has led to the expansion of the casino industry. One greatest thing that happens in technology is that you can adapt to new trend very quickly. Currently, cryptocurrency is taking over as the means of payment because with it you are guaranteed of great financial security and anonymity. Most popular cryptocurrency is the Bitcoin and it has offered very strong facility where even governments are unable to track owners of the casinos or even the players. With this cryptocurrency being used as a mode of payment, the casino industry has grown internationally simply because players from restricted countries can play in anonymity and get their winnings in form of cryptocurrency.

There has also been a shift in focus where most online casinos are introducing casinos that operate in the blockchain technology whereby there is an outcome of better features and makes the future of the casino industry look great.

Choice and variety

With new trend in the area of technology, there have been development of the multi-dimensional approach across the casino industry. There has been great input in the development of the games that offers great and clear features to the players and the viewers.

With online gambling, bookers can feel a redefined industry. When you look at the betting sites, you will realize that they have been customized in a manner that it has a very powerful interface which offers the gamers a very welcoming experience while carrying out the gambling at the comfort of their wish. The introduction cool visuals and the tense atmosphere which tries to mimic the situations in real-life has made the online casino industry more and more beautiful. This actually evidence from the growth of the numbers on the gamblers who are who prefer doing their gambling online as compared to those who prefer doing it manually or in the traditional land-based gambling. For example, most online gambling industry have decided to introduce the eSports games in their online gambling platform and this shows the potential of that innovation has made in the gambling industry.

The variety of the games available in the online casino platform has also led to the increased number of gamers joining the gambling industry where some online casinos offer more than 2000 games that a gamer can choose from. The vast options of the games that are available ensure that gamers are never bored due to the availability of too many games options to choose. In some occasions, virtual reality has been involved in making this online gaming industry a reality. The use of this high technology glasses has made gamblers experience more entertainment as they feel inserted into the world of different reality. Users are able to have a real time interaction that is based on the traditional land-based casino interactions.

Customer support system and security

Despite the great growth in the online gaming industry, it comes home with some disadvantages especially on matters security since it is accompanied with a lot of attacks that are directed towards the gamers. This frequent security attacks are more as compared to what is experienced in the traditional land-based casino. Since the digital information is always very sensitive, it is the duty of the casino site to keep the information very safe lest it falls in the hands of the wrong person. The sensitive personal information that is required for online casino can be used for identity where the client can lose a lot of money through hacking. Online casinos have been forced to use new technology in securing their sites in order to protect their clients from insecurity that might occur.

Some online casinos have even gone a step higher whereby they use the artificial intelligent to improve the security of the site and ensure that they monitor every movement that is made on the sites. There has also been a way where users have to provide the 2FA authentication to ensure that only authorized members get access to the sites.

Customer support has also moved a notch higher with the advent of new advanced ways of solving customer issues in the online casino platforms. In the online casino platforms, you will come across emails, call centers and even live chats which have been introduced in the recent years to improv on customer care services. Some of these casinos have a way of offering 24/7 customer care services and this is done to prove to the customers that they are gambling in a very safe place. This proper customer care services have led to the expansion of the casino industry globally.

The mobile casino industry

The advent of the smartphone industry has also increased the growth in the online industry. Today, the largest population of the world have a smartphone in their pocket and this has led to the people participation more in the online casino games and gambling. Online casinos have taken advantage in the growth of the smartphone owners and have come up with sites that are mobile friendly giving their players a very fascinating environment to entertain themselves. The mobile casino games are very revolutionary as players can get access to the games at any time and any locations and this has made it very convenient to the gamers the mobile phones have introduced portability to this industry.

Better marketing

Some few years ago, the gamers used to visit the betting shops to play games. With the introduction of the online casino, it has become do possible for the games to rich people easily and in any location of this world. Some companies have moved the impact higher by organizing gaming competitions that involves millions of people which could not be achieved in the traditional hall because of the spacing and difficulty in managing the outcome. The online casino has actually introduced the new investment opportunity for the people. This online casino has actually introduced new technology trends in order to place itself in a position which can rival the competitors and also give the pundits an improved gaming experience. They have come up with very user -friendly interfaces that come in with several important features. Some of these sites use artificial intelligent to settle and update results and games too. All these activities are being done to ensure that the online casino site has more clients joining.

Artificial intelligent

Modern online casinos have gone into another level whereby the use of artificial intelligent have revolutionized the industry. Artificial intelligence such as the use of the chatbots have been used to help the gamblers in placement of the bets. The same artificial intelligence has been used by the sites to help customers in the processing of their payments from the bookies and also process withdrawal request for the clients. The bot is very important in this industry because they can offer unlimited customer support. The artificial intelligence has also found use in the online casino industry where the gamers have an interest in playing against the machines instead of playing against the other gamers. Also, the Sportbooks have been using various artificial intelligence mechanism to help the users of the various websites find the various icons and learn how to use the sites.

Mobile phone applications

The smartphone, tablets and the internet industry has made major technological impact in the area of the online casino industry. Statistics show that in 2012 there was a great improvement in the use of the online casino by 12% globally. This improvement was introduced due to the revolutionization of the smartphone and the internet industry. Now close to over one hundred and sixty million pundits visit online casinos on their phones using the mobile phones applications. The mobile gambling is said to be contributing at least 50% of the revenue that is generated from the gambling industry. The mobile applications have greatly impacted on the growth of the online casinos industry.

In conclusion, the online casino industry has grown to a greater extent through the introduction of so many trends in the areas of money transfer, online payment methods, the introduction of artificial intelligence, the great extent to which the mobile phone application industry has grown higher, the introduction of better marketing strategies, better customer support and security systems. With all these, the industry has grown to something else, something better and something magnificent attracting more bookies worldwide.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Hello friends, I hope you all are doing great. In today's tutorial, I am going to give you a detailed Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Today I am talking about the origin of Artificial Intelligence, you will learn how it was invented and how it is getting emerged gradually in the field of science and technology. We will also discuss few AI tests and will understand its relation with neural networks. As it's my first post on AI, so I will only cover it's basics in today's lecture but in coming lectures, we will not only discuss its complex concepts but will also design different algorithms to understand its practical approach. So, let's get started with Introduction to Artificial Intelligence:

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

• John McCarthy is known as the father of Artificial Intelligence. According to him:

"Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of designing intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs."

I have been teaching Artificial Intelligence to engineering students for five years and I normally assign them projects at the end of their course and the one, I really enjoyed was "virtual psychiatrist", designed by a group of 5 students. You can tell that robot your symptoms/condition and it will tell you the cure and measures. During it's evaluation, the virtual Psychiatrist asked "What's your problem?" I replied, "I am fine" but still it suggested numerous cures and several therapies. I laughed and told the students that this software will not qualify for the Turing test. Now, you must be thinking, what's a Turing Test, so let's have a look at it:

What is the Turing Test?

In 1950, a great computer scientist, Alan Turning, wrote a research paper and provide a mechanism to determine, whether machines actually think or not. To examine it, he gave an experiment, which is called the Turing Test. Below is the illustration of this experiment followed by the details:

• As you can see in above figure, we have:
  • A as an artificially intelligent software/hardware,
  • C as an invigilator,
  •  and B as a human.
• C is supposed to ask different questions from both the agents i.e. A & B, and determine which one is AI software and which one is human.
• A is supposed to deceive the Human Questioner i.e. C and make it believe that it's a human.
• If C is failed to detect that which one is an AI software among A & B, then this software will be called as an "intelligent software" because it answered those questions, to which only a human is supposed to answer.
• This test is called the Turing test.

The 90's kids are very well aware of the software known as ELIZA, which was created by Joseph Weizenbaum (from 1964 to 1966) at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This was a psychological software and could give us the therapy, when we would ask for it (I remember being in grade eighth and asking her how to propose a boy, who was my crush back then, poor me) because it was fed by MIT, but if I would ask her the recipe of cookies, she definitely wouldn't tell me.

• SHAKEY was the first artificial intelligent robot, whose job was to pick the product and then drop it on a specific spot, but again if I ask the recipe of the cookies, it won't tell me. :D

Coming to the era of 1980s, when Garry Kasparov was the world champion in chess and was defeated by a software called DEEP BLUE, this software is designed by IBM and you will be amazed by knowing that it was the first time that a human was defeated in chess by a software. But again if you ask Deep Blue how to make cookies, you know what the answer would be! The reason is that those robots which were created in the past centuries were Rule-based bots or Software, they were given rules, statements and logic but if we ask questions from other domains, they won't be able to answer them, hence although those software were highly intellectual but they don't belong to AI category.

How Human Brain works ?

At an early age or the very beginning, shape of the human brain was different, but as this specie started evolving, it developed the learning capacity, got smarter and intelligent. We have a very complicated connection network (bellow is the image) in our brain which is built by trillions of cells, the smallest cell of the brain is called "Neuron" and it also contains trillions of connections, so if we would able to utilize the processing of brain in software, the would become intelligent too, Artificially Intelligent. For example, if you look closely at the figure above, this is the basic unit of cell where dendrites, which provide connections, then a cell in the center (nucleus) where decisions are being made and then there is an axon cell, which is responsible to give the decision as an output. Same as we make a flowchart where we have inputs, decision-making centers, and we have an output based on that decision. So, if we connect those intelligent unit cells many times, we can design a Neural Network, which is also the hot topic of the research, nowadays. The Neural Network

• Now, you must have the basic idea of what neurons are, so now, let's have a look at a simple neural network, as shown in below figure:

• The first layer of the neural network is the input layer.
• The second layer is the hidden layer.
• And finally, we have the third layer, the output layer.

Single input of a neural network can be connected to multiple stages.

Examples of AI software

Let's understand neural network with the help of a simple project.

• Once I have designed a project in MATLAB, where I need to detect Horse in different images.
• So, I have added a lot of horse pictures in different postures & angles in database.
• Then using those images, I have trained my software to differentiate between horse and other animals.
• Finally, once I have completed my horse recognition algorithm, then I tested it with around 100 new images of animals.
• It has recognized horse in 80 images but was unable to detect in remaining 20 images.

So my point here is, efficiency of an AI software depends on its algorithm. You can achieve 100% results as well as we human get from our brain, we can quite easily recognize the horse in any image. But again, let's say if the image is taken from a distance, then may be you can also get confused. Nowadays, we have so much data, also known as big data, so if we provide such data to our software, then it will be able to learn and hence its intelligence will be increased, so there's a 99 percent chance that it will tell us how to make a COOKIE! :D So, when we reached to neural network or deep learning, our software will behave smartly.

• I will take you to the software IBM WATSON, which is designed by IBM and this software stood first in America's largest quiz show, Jeopardy, which was being played with the top two champions. A software won $100000mn, whoa!
• Let’s talk about Alpha Go, this software beaten the champion of that time.
• It will be an injustice, if we don't talk about Eugene Goostman, he has designed the first-ever software, which depicts a 13-year-old boy and it has qualified the Turing test. Though there are controversies about it, this is the only software that managed to convince 33 invigilators out of hundred that IT’S A HUMAN.

Author's Remarks

IQ Level of a human lies between 70 to 130, but imagine a software having the IQ level of 100,000, then will human intelligence be able to counter it?. In an Interview, the well renowned AI robot Sophia tells the host while countering a question about a bad future with robots that you have been reading too much Elon Musk and watching so many Hollywood movies about the robots but if you are nice to me I am nice to you, treat me as a smart input-output system. But let me tell you, many scientists (especially Elon musk and Stephen hawking) in the world have predicted that AI will take over the human race and that will be catastrophic. The question is how we are preparing ourselves to counter it. Are we writing the death of our generations with our own hands? Or we think that they will live peacefully with us like our friends, neighbors or relatives? Are there any chances that they won't dominate us & will only obey us? Or we need to find a way that technological advancement keeps on progressing but stays under control. So, that was all for today. I hope you have enjoyed today's tutorial. We have discussed the basics of Artificial Intelligence today. In coming lecture, we will cover more complex topics on AI. Till then take care & have fun !!! :)