01/09/2017 A Trick Revealed - Potpourri

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A Trick Revealed

If you want to know how this works you are first going to have to, like it or not, listen to a lecture on magic. If
you dont want to do that STOP here and go do something else.

Magicians dont like to reveal how tricks are done. The guy on television who is making a very good living
doing exactly that is generally reviled by all magicians and their various clubs and organizations. Why is that?
There are two primary reasons. First, most people that see how the magic is done are disappointed. Oh, is that
it? Is that all theres to it? Well thats stupid! Some actually get mad, either at the magician who fooled them
or at themselves for not having seen through the magicians antics. Why? Because most everyone still retains
that childish desire to see a miracle occur and most magic does indeed seem like a miracle.

The other reason is that magic is an art form. The trick itself has been created by someone and his or hers
property. If I use it myself, without their permission, thats stealing. If I reveal how it works thats also
stealing but even more reprehensible. For that reason magicians have an unwritten but clearly understood pact
that they will not reveal a trick. This is not any sort of contract or agreement between them, its just
understood. If they belong to a magic club or other magicians organization this agreement is usually expressed
in writing to them although this has little real effect, i.e., there is nothing legally that can be done to force their
compliance. For some reason that has never been explained to me, the development of a magic trick apparently
cannot be patented. But what about my using someone elses trick? I can do that if I buy it. The same holds
true if I buy a book of magic tricks. The author has been compensated and that act is condoned so, in a sense,
not revealing a trick is protecting some magicians income.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the performance of magic is ten percent mechanical trickery and ninety
percent showmanship, the latter sometimes comprised of extreme and fascinating dexterity. A famous magician
once said, A magician is an actor playing the role of a magician. So when you reveal the trick itself you have
stripped it of all the things that a magician does to make it magical. The mechanics of a trick or illusion can be
simple or extremely difficult. Some of the great illusions that David Copperfield performs could probably be
learned by anyone in ten minutes while the sleight of hand needed to do some card tricks can take years of
practice to accomplish perfection.

Getting back to the showmanship aspects, there are many of these. The most important one is misdirection - the

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art of doing one thing while making the spectator look someplace else. There is patter - the verbal
presentation, if any. Obfuscation the hiding of action, things, people, etc. False focus having the spectator
focus on something to the degree that they misinterpret. Reading the audience. These, and many more
techniques, make a really good magician a great showman.

Having said all that, Im going to reveal how a trick works primarily because it illustrates how a wonderful bit
of magic can be produced using a simple mechanical trick while the showmanship has been superbly
accomplished by using the computer as the magician.

The trick can be found at a number of sites on the net and with various forms of presentation but one that I like
is at:

http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/guessyournumber.swf
(http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/guessyournumber.swf)

Before going further, go to that site, follow the instructions; and be amazed. Then read the rest of this.

This little Internet trick is the modern version of the old card trick that is probably one of the first learned by
kids. You lay down 25 cards in five vertical columns and have someone mentally pick out a card and tell you
what column it's in. Then, gather up the cards and, keeping them in the same order, lay them down again, but
this time in rows and have them tell you now which column it's in. Since you've simply laid down the rows in
such a way that they are the original columns only now presented horizontally, you can immediately spot the
card they selected. The mechanics of this are so simple that, unless handled with great showmanship, it would
not play well with most audiences. An amateur would go through the motions and then announce the selected
card. However, a magician would use misdirection to make the mechanical process seem more difficult using
patter and possibly add extra and unnecessary actions. He would also reveal the selected card in some other
manner. He might simply false shuffle and false cut the deck while keeping track of the card and then reveals it
or even find it someplace else his pocket, your pocket or in a sealed envelope. On the computer, this trick
uses some of all these techniques.

Since the computer is the magician in this instance I will refer to the computer as he in the following.

Look at the first screen and you'll see a square of 25 numbers in five
different colors and in five columns.

The colors are pink, brown, green, blue and black. So, you look at a number, fix it in mind and then select its
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color by clicking on one of the five buttons at the bottom of the square. Unfortunately the picture I show
mistakenly shows the fourth button as white. Please ignore that, you will see it as the color it actually is - blue.
What youve done by this action is to identify which column your number is in:

Pink Brown Green Blue Black

1 2 9 3 7

6 5 12 4 8

4 13 16 10 11

21 15 23 17 19

22 20 25 18 24

Once you've done this the trick is half over just like I said it is done in the old card trick I mentioned earlier.

Now you go to the next screen.

Interesting - you've got a bunch of numbers. Nine, in fact, four more than you had before and some are different
and you have to pick one. So, what does that accomplish? Absolutely nothing! It's just a misdirection to get
your mind of the track he, the computer, is on. But you have to select something to keep the action going so
pick any one and move on.

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Ah! This is more interesting. We have five houses with six numbers in each house. This totals 30, which
doesnt make sense because you only started out with 25 but, of course, you havent noticed that, have you? He
added the nos. 26 - 30 to make the columns in the house look even and neat. Also, the color pink has
disappeared and you now have some purple colored numbers in the first house. Again, its nothing more than a
misdirection to prevent you from seeing how the trick works by realizing the numbers have been so collected as
if they were put in rows. You probably also havent spotted that the colors of the numbers have changed. A
blue 17 in screen 1 is now a brown 17 in house C. Hes having you focus on the houses the numbers are in, not
their colors. So, by picking the house your number is in he has made five rows:

House A: Purple: 1, 4, 11, 12, 13, 30

House B: Blue: 2, 9, 10, 21, 24, 26
House C: Brown: 8, 14, 17, 20, 25, 28
House D: Black: 3, 5, 19, 22, 23, 27
House E: Green: 6, 7, 15, 16, 18, 29

OK, to illustrate whats happened to this point lets start by selecting blue 4 as your number. You click on the
blue button and advance to screen 2 where you click on any color your heart desires and then go to screen 3
and see your number is in house A so you select that house. The trick is over at this point - he knows that 4 is
your number! How does he know that? What gives? Well, look at each of the other numbers in house A and
check out their original colors as shown in Screen 1. The 1 was pink, the 11 was black, the 12 was green and
the 13 was brown. Of course, the only number in house A that could be your number is the 4. The
disappearance of pink and appearance of purple was simply misdirection and the number 30 never existed in the
first screen. He wanted to make it appear that the colors at this stage of the trick had been reshuffled so to speak
and were really not affecting the outcome. If you had selected the pink 6, for example, youll see that 6 is the
only blue number in house A. In essence, what he has done is taken that little kids card trick and made the

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columns the colors and the rows the houses. At this point youre probably kicking yourself for having been
tricked so easily. Now comes the means of revealing the number. He could just tell you, at this point, Your
number is 4. But thats no fun very poor showmanship. Worse yet, it may have you consider more carefully
what happened and begin getting an inkling of how it was done.

Better to use some more smoke so he throws in screen 4. What you see are four supposedly "Crystal" orbs. Of
course what you don't know is that, as in screen 2 earlier, your selection of one of the orbs has absolutely
nothing to do with the trick. If anything it just gives him a little time to set up the next move.

It's in screen five that the revelation and the "magic" occurs. I picked the middle door but you could have
picked any one.

He knew at screen 3 what number you had selected so he simply puts that number behind whatever door you
click on! Its the act of clicking on the door that makes the number appear at that point on the monitor screen.
Only a Computer can do that and get away with it. You can't see it being done because, you'll notice, the doors
open rather slowly. And then he adds a neat, little touch to convince you that he did, indeed, create a small
miracle because you can open the other doors and see different numbers behind them. There you have it; it is
really an excellent example of taking a simple "trick" and, with a lot of dressing up and tomfoolery, making it
seem quite impossible.

The Great Zucchini.

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