Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
18 lines (10 loc) · 2.15 KB

stage-magic.md

File metadata and controls

18 lines (10 loc) · 2.15 KB
Raw

This ties naturally to the section about scams.

Alternatively, here's an article from Bruce Schneier about hacking papal election: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/02/hacking_the_pap.html

Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-his-secrets-100744801/?all&no-ist

Magician Teller says:

  1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.
  2. Keep the trickery outside the frame. I take off my jacket and toss it aside. Then I reach into your pocket and pull out a tarantula. Getting rid of the jacket was just for my comfort, right? Not exactly. As I doffed the jacket, I copped the spider.
  3. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

This could be the section that would live on the Internet. It will end with a puzzle (say Sudoku), but there will be 2 versions of the puzzle served to the user on random basis. The result of the puzzle will lead to two different following chapters in the book. This is magic trick in itself:

  1. It distracts you from the puzzle by talking about stage magic (see pt.2 above)
  2. It uses your pattern recognotion -- the web page is rendered the same way as the book -- to make you believe that mechanics of both are the same. In reality, they are not. Web page can serve randomly selected content.