Norman Packard

[2][3] Between 1976 and 1981, Packard formed the Dynamical Systems Collective at UC Santa Cruz with fellow physics graduate students, Rob Shaw, Doyne Farmer, and James Crutchfield.

[4] Around the same time, he worked with Doyne Farmer and other friends in Santa Cruz, California to form the Eudaemons collective, to develop a strategy for beating the roulette wheel using a toe-operated computer.

The computer could, in theory, predict in what area a roulette ball would land on a wheel, giving the player a significant statistical advantage over the house.

Packard was involved with the Santa Fe Institute over many years, serving in several capacities including External Professor and member of the chair of the Science Steering Committee.

In the spring of 1985, Packard and Doyne Farmer realized that their research in fields such as chaos, Genetic Algorithms and cellular automata could help build a system for predicting the stock market.

In 2018, Packard launched a web-based optimization and discovery tool on the internet (a form of Software as a Service), changing the company name from ProtoLife to Daptics,[11] to better reflect its new focus.