Scientific American – Forget the simple nickel slots of yesteryear. Today’s digital slot machines and poker screens in casinos and at online gambling sites are capable of amassing a wealth of behavioral data on individual players, and they are on the verge of altering game play on the fly. As the software becomes increasingly capable of “thinking” like the gamblers themselves, experts in the gambling research community are working to create machines that will identify and assist problem gamblers, rather than simply pushing players deeper into a financial hole. Researchers at the University of Brescia and other institutions in Italy…