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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

If anyone here is really into magic I have a question, I don't really want you to tell me an answer (you wont anyway) but rather what to search for to find the answers.

One trick I have seen that seems completely magic:

- magician showing the cards asking spectator to think of one, then shuffling the cards and shortly after producing the card. The point is the spectator didn't touch it, didn't speak, didn't have to follow steps. The only obvious explanation is that is was rigged bit given the circumstances that doesn't make sense.

Obviously I missed something. It must have been a wonderful force of some kind and it still annoys me 5 years after.

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Not a magician, just a background in cognitive psychology. One way of manipulating these probabilities is by presenting specific cards ever so slightly longer while "ruffling" (not sure if this is the proper word, where you sequentially show each card in one smooth motion) the cards. You can do this for multiple cards and lower the amount of cards someone could've possibly chosen.

Another is by memorizing the order in which the cards were shown, and looking at subtle cues of arousal (mostly pupil dilation) indicating that a card has been picked...

Third, people don't uniformly randomly select cards, they have biases towards specific spots ( you wouldnt pick the absolute first card, nor the last one.. etc.)

Fourth, your deck doesn't ne essarily have 52 unique cards.. it just needs to seem like it while showing the cards.

It's a game of probabilities, but you can massage the probabilities in your favour. The shuffling at the end is just indirection..

I'll also be coy, but will make an observation: you described what you saw. but, you didn't describe everything that actually happened.

Well, you already know that the technique used is called a "force". There's a book that collects 202 versions; probably it's in there somewhere.

I'm going to be coy here: that's a classic in magic, with many possible solutions!

Just as a tangent: what you posed is an example of what the magic community refers to as a problem (what the spectator sees). Magicians then try to come up with a method that satisfies all the constraints specified in the problem.

Heh

Slightly more annoying though is that I seem to have forgotten to add a website I found last time I researched "mind reading" to my bookmark collection at pinboard.

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