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Alan Turing revealed the secret to winning big at the roulette wheel before turning his attention to the Enigma symbol, unearthed messages reveal.
A handwritten seven-page letter from a British codebreaker was found by relatives of the man who sent it to him in 1933.
It is now set to be hammered and is expected to sell for around £50,000.
Turing, then twenty-one at the time an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge, had emailed the father of a school friend, Alfred Bettel, using equations to assess his chances of winning at roulette.
He told Beutle Turing about his “Monte Carlo” method he had used during a successful month of gambling on the French Riviera and asked the young mathematician for his opinion.
Mr. Bettel’s system was duly put to the test, publishing equations to determine the odds of winning after 150, 1520, 4560 and 30400 laps.
In the letter, Turning notes from his calculations that it is possible to earn an “unexpectedly large amount” in the short term.
However, he concluded that the longer a player played, “the higher his chances of winning”.
Turing wrote: “In the short term, one is likely to win or lose an unexpectedly large amount.
“With the increase in the length of the range, the chances of winning become further away.”
He concluded by saying: “Greetings to all, and please do not feel that there is any need to respond to the delirium of this delirium.”
It was dispatched nearly a decade ago before Turing made his name at the deciphering center in Bletchley Park as Britain deciphered German military messages during the war.
Most famously, his work helped decipher the Enigma code used by Nazi forces to send messages securely.
His 1933 letter has been owned by the Bettel family for 88 years, and is now being sold by relatives at Bonhams Auctions in London.
Matthew Haley, Head of Books and Manuscripts at Bonhams, said: “Although his analysis of the Bettel gambling system was done in a spirit of playfulness, it underscores Turing’s fascination with possibilities, and their application to cryptography.
“This was a key to the decryption work at Bletchley Park during World War II for which he is of course famous.”
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