Between 1976 and 1981, he worked with fellow graduate students in Santa Cruz, California, forming the Eudaemons collective with J. Doyne Farmer and Robert Shaw, 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. Although the project itself was a success, they ran into great practical difficulty employing the technique on-site in Las Vegas casinos, and many of the members left to pursue other fields of academia. The experiences of Norman, Doyne Farmer, and crew were later chronicled in the book The Eudaemonic Pie (1985) by Thomas Bass. Their experience was also chronicled on the television series "Breaking Vegas."

Around the same time, he formed the Dynamical Systems Collective with friends Rob Shaw, Doyne Farmer, and James Crutchfield. The collective was best known for its work in probing chaotic systems for signs of order.

In 1982, Packard left Santa Cruz for France to take a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. Disappointed with the lack of technology at the institute, he left after one year and joined the Institute for Advanced Study. At the IAS, he worked with Stephen Wolfram and friend Rob Shaw to explain cellular automata and the tendency for matter to organize itself.

Prediction Company

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. Five years later they founded Prediction Company, a small company dedicated to making a model for predicting what a market would do during a certain time period. A brief outline of some of the genetic algorithm techniques he used in the early days is presented in chapter 2 of reference 5 below. In 2004, Prediction Company received the "Employer of Choice" award in the small size category for the State of New Mexico. The company still exists today as a subsidiary of Swiss bank UBS AG.

ProtoLife

Packard's latest project is ProtoLife, the first company to capitalize on living technology. The goal of the company is to produce artificial living cells that can perform useful chemical functions. The company is based in Venice, Italy.