This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. This is one reason magicians don't reveal "secrets". The reality is most magical methods are rather disappointing compared to the astonishing impact of the effect created.
For any magical effect there are almost always many possible methods and, conversely, for each method there are multiple possible effects. This method provides a way to know the location (or absence) of each card in a shuffled deck without the performer handling the deck. For most of the effects which could be accomplished with this method there exist a wide variety of alternate, much simpler, methods. Using any of those easier and cheaper methods would likely appear identically amazing to audiences. And that's why I love this method. As a technologist and magician, I've always had a special fondness for wildly complex methods - that rare kind of magic where the method actually IS as amazing as the effect.
One of my favorite magic tricks is one I've learnt. You have 31 cards prepared in an order determined by a linear shift register. The audience is allowed to cut the deck as often as they want (thus maintaining cyclic order) after which they draw 5 cards. Simply by asking which audience members hold red cards you can compute which cards they're holding.
I've also performed this trick by combining two decks with different patterns on the back, allowing you to 'divine' their cards without ever asking a question.
It's amazing what you can do if you can memorize an (apparently) random order of 52 cards. It's not that hard to do (even for an actual random ordering) and it enables a decent number of tricks.
The routines in that case are designed to be entertaining, they don't give away secrets that aren't theirs to begin with, and there's often a double bluff where they purport to give away secrets, but there's still an element they don't disclose, or the supposed secret is just misdirection (e.g. the phone inside fish trick)
A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. They don't reveal those tricks.
> a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing.
That's true but when slight of hand is amazing it's usually amazing in a different way than the OP's method. At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." At least to other magicians, uniquely good sleight of hand is amazing due to the insane level of skill and years of rigorous practice required to "hide something in your hand" in a way that appears impossible.
While developing the OP's method did require amazing effort and serious engineering skill, someone else could then perform with that method without the same unique level of technical skill.
I too have a passion for complex magic tricks. And while what you say may be true for tricks which rely on gimmicks, with sleight of hand, the opposite is often true. I was a stage illusionist in a 'former life', and started practicing sleight of hand at age 6. The thing that kept me interested is that the methods of producing the effect were almost always far more interesting than the effect they produce.
In my own art, I focused on vintage effects that were complex. I recreated dozens of effects from Dunninger's book, and relied on technological principles from that era - lots of clockwork and curious mechanisms. I could have produced the same effect in much easier ways, but what would be the fun in that?
Many methods require inconceivable practice to master. One example is an obscure method of the "front to back palm" with a coin, which thereafter goes back to front - the most complex sleight of hand I worked on, which produces a completely mundane effect (showing the hands empty). In my experience, if you see someone doing sleight of hand - making cards, balls, coins, cigarettes appear and disappear - watching how they do it is much more interesting than watching the effect!
I too had Dunninger's book when I was a kid. You may already know this but it was subsequently shown by magic historians that Dunninger actually never used some of the methods described in the book and never even performed some of the effects shown by any method. He just made some of the effects up along with their supposed methods to have more fodder to fill the book. It's a pretty fascinating story and perhaps his 'best' trick.
Penn likes to say that a lot of magic boils down to no one really believing anyone is going to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing. Magicians are people who are willing to spend the time and resources to do the obvious thing.
Like people who seem to swallow things and then reproduce them later. The easiest method to do that is to swallow the thing and then regurgitate it. And you can train yourself to do this. But it takes time and effort. And is a little gross and if you're working with live animals, you are also on a time limit.
My favorite example he gave: Buy 52 decks of cards. Put all the 7s of diamonds together in one deck. Let your audience member pick a card. It's the 7 of diamonds.
> This is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite.
I don't know much about magic, but I've always felt that the method is almost always more amazing than the effect. I am vastly more interested in the methods, skills, and preparation that goes into a trick than I am in just watching a final performance.
Penn (of Penn and Teller) says that there are two kinds of magic tricks. Ones that are so unbelievably easy you cannot imagine the method, and the ones that involve so much work you cannot imagine the method. One time, he saw a magician perform a trick and guessed he had been in prison, because the amount of work it takes to prep it is so long there's no way anyone else would have the time.
and Teller says that the secret to a good trick is to put in more effort than the audience thinks any same person would. The Prestige has tricks like this (some totally fictional, some based on real magicians).
The method is interesting, but magic entertains because of the performance/mystery. If you use this tool without providing any of that, it's boring, and people will probably assume you're some form of camera/tool/cheat/hidden helpers and leave unimpressed.
> a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect
I once heard this described as when you hear the method of a trick, a great trick is one where you go "Ah!" with amazement instead of "Oh", disappointed.
Nice analysis! As James Randi said of Uri Geller “[he] may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.”
This tech could be a game changer for accessibility. Many card games are not or cannot be adapted to braille, so I haven't been able to play them with friends. If cards can be sold with invisible ink in an open format, then I would need only a scanner and a earphone to be able to check my cards without other help.
I've thought of doing with with QR codes, but I'm not sure if it will look okay for the other players and if the qr codes won't be recognizable enough by a human to give someone unfair advantage in some situations.
Duplicate bridge cards are often printed with barcodes on the card faces, to facilitate automated dealing machines with computerised hand records. I've never seen a system which reads the barcodes for a blind player, but I'm sure it's possible. (The traditional approach is with a human 'card turner' assisting, which sucks for all kinds of reasons). Or even just reading the standard face images: it's a much easier problem than reading codes on the edges, and has the advantage of not making it easier to cheat!
Normal cards are a solved issue. You can print two braille symbols on each and it is done. Imagine though something like cards against humanity for example, where the text on the card would take ten times the space in braille. In different games images and details could have different meaning and simple ocr would be the wrong solution.
Combined with a system like [0] on a head-mounted device with earbuds, it could make many card games accessible to blind and partially sighted people! No idea if this prototype was ever put into production though.
There is already tech like this for TV poker games. RFID chips in the cards I think, and sensors in the table. There was a huge scandal a couple of years back about a player who had access to the info while playing. Google Mike Postle...
This is how a poker TV table actually work now. Each card has an HF RFID tag, each position has one antenna where players must put card when not seeing them. In addition there is another antenna in the middle of the table to read the common cards. In the past mini cameras were used for each position in combination with OCR to decode the cards.
This sort of tables require collaboration from the players and from the dealer to obtain something useful to show on TV. They are instructed before the game.
Very neat. In the video, the illicit cheating device was hidden in a phone.
It is theorized that these magic trick could be used in private poker houses to cheat players.
This is amazing! This tech unlocks some impossible card effects (ex: "shuffle the deck, pick your favorite card from it, hand the deck back to me, your card is the Ace of Diamonds").
While reading through this repo I was reminded of a project I'd heard Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox Software (creators of the Borderlands franchise) talk about wanting to make after one of the magic shows he hosted at his house in Frisco, Texas.
Randy is a huge fan of magic. He's the great nephew of Cardini and notably recently purchased the Magic Castle[1].
Lo and behold, the primary contributor to this project—Paul Nettle—is an employee at Gearbox Software[2]. What a small world! I'm so happy they've made this open source.
That's interesting background for having Pen and Teller in the Borderlands 3 [0], and also for the passing resemblance between the Calypso twins and the Ehrlich brothers...
When I was a kid, my dad had my brothers and me pick a card from a deck without showing it to him then reinsert it into the deck. He then threw the deck into the air scattering the cards on the floor and then picked our card up from the floor.
There's more than one that I can think of, and the best I've ever done is the "imaginary deck" one.
Setup: shuffle an imaginary deck, fan the imaginary deck, tell someone to pick an imaginary card and remember it, shuffle it back into the imaginary deck and put the deck in your pocket.
Remove a deck from your pocket, ask what the card was, fan the deck out, and - it's the only upside down card in the deck!?
A magician I know talks about the three kinds of magic: sleight of hand, mechanical, and mathematical. The first requires a lot of skill and practice (e.g., palming coins, manipulating cards). The second requires a lot of preparation and engineering (e.g., sawing a person in half, floating person illusions). The third relies on the nature of reality (e.g., dividing sets of cards in a known pattern that forces a result, or manipulating numbers that force an unexpected result).
So this is a cool example of the second type. All three types require some showmanship, and good patter. Some of the best tricks combine the types.
Mathematical are often the "easiest" to learn, though they can be the hardest to "sell" when performing, because you have to play ups the magic and downplay the math (often forcing the "numbers" used is a great way to mask it.
Mechanical involves some training and skill to exercise well.
But above all I put the sleight of hand as the hardest to execute but the best when done well, especially added as flourish on top of the others.
There is a corresponding custom phone that has a hidden camera on the side (facing the deck) that then communicates with some haptic feedback that the cheater is wearing.
Wow, what a next level magic trick enabler. Just me that get the feeling that I am reading a documentation that could be under NDA in a billion dollar magic trick company?
Barcodes are an underapprecated technology for amateur projects in general. The technology is error-resistant, mature and reliable in a hardware sense, cheap at the entry level and cheap to deploy at scale, etc. I got a surplus commercial Zebra/Symbol 2D/3D barcode scanner gun with dock (or it also talks bluetooth, USB, or naturally RS232) for $35 and a new OEM battery was $15, and tbh you could just have used a smartphone with an app instead if I didn't want the speed and reliability of the scanner gun. Barcodes are the cost of a sheet of printer paper and some tape (or sticker paper if you want to be fancy!) and are an extremely accessible and tactile way to operate all kinds of systems (a barcode doesn't have to be a "thing", it can represent an "action" too) via a control server, same as via an app. Pressing a button in an app is way slower and more cumbersome than scanning a barcode on the wall that says "advance belt to next item", a scanner gun is an enormously fast and tactile UX, and RS-232 and other low-level interfaces make it easy to tie into other stuff. It's a fantastic project tool that is really underexploited compared to "everything is ESP32 on the network".
The bar-code and shipping container are probably some of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, and unlike a shipping container it's completely appropriate and accessible to individuals for messing around with projects.
(no, your shipping container home is not actually a good idea)
Very cool project! I’m curious how the magician would typically use this, would the scanner and an output monitor be hidden somewhere on stage or similar?
Not a magician, just watch tricks occasionally and enjoy thinking about how they're made.
I wouldn't necessarily expect the monitor to be visual as card tricks usually just need knowledge of a couple of cards. This could be communicated through sound (e.g. discrete earpiece or bone conduction headphones) or even haptics (e.g. Morse code vibrations from a phone in a pocket).
As for the scanner, it'll depend on the trick, the goal is just to hide a camera. It could be concealed in a prop or an item of clothing. The scanning could even be incorporated into the trick, for example by sealing the cards immediately in a "safe".
I could see someone using this on stage in Penn & Teller's Fool Us. The camera hidden in the table, on the table an elaborate box that never comes into contact with the cards, is used as some elaborate red herring (maybe you have to knock on it, or draw something from it), but really serves to hide a small screen.
Now you only have to come up with some impressive card trick that seems impossible to pull off with conventional methods.
Of course you could also come up with a better method to communicate the information than an ipad screen. Maybe a tactile signal.
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For any magical effect there are almost always many possible methods and, conversely, for each method there are multiple possible effects. This method provides a way to know the location (or absence) of each card in a shuffled deck without the performer handling the deck. For most of the effects which could be accomplished with this method there exist a wide variety of alternate, much simpler, methods. Using any of those easier and cheaper methods would likely appear identically amazing to audiences. And that's why I love this method. As a technologist and magician, I've always had a special fondness for wildly complex methods - that rare kind of magic where the method actually IS as amazing as the effect.
I've also performed this trick by combining two decks with different patterns on the back, allowing you to 'divine' their cards without ever asking a question.
See here for details: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/01/mathematics_and...
You're probably right about it being the majority, but I'd say a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing.
Penn and Teller are also famous for doing tricks with the secret in full view, and they're often more impressive than the trick done normally.
A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. They don't reveal those tricks.
That's true but when slight of hand is amazing it's usually amazing in a different way than the OP's method. At the highest conceptual level, the "secret method" of most sleight of hand can be boiled down to "You hid something in your hand." At least to other magicians, uniquely good sleight of hand is amazing due to the insane level of skill and years of rigorous practice required to "hide something in your hand" in a way that appears impossible.
While developing the OP's method did require amazing effort and serious engineering skill, someone else could then perform with that method without the same unique level of technical skill.
In my own art, I focused on vintage effects that were complex. I recreated dozens of effects from Dunninger's book, and relied on technological principles from that era - lots of clockwork and curious mechanisms. I could have produced the same effect in much easier ways, but what would be the fun in that?
Many methods require inconceivable practice to master. One example is an obscure method of the "front to back palm" with a coin, which thereafter goes back to front - the most complex sleight of hand I worked on, which produces a completely mundane effect (showing the hands empty). In my experience, if you see someone doing sleight of hand - making cards, balls, coins, cigarettes appear and disappear - watching how they do it is much more interesting than watching the effect!
Like people who seem to swallow things and then reproduce them later. The easiest method to do that is to swallow the thing and then regurgitate it. And you can train yourself to do this. But it takes time and effort. And is a little gross and if you're working with live animals, you are also on a time limit.
I don't know much about magic, but I've always felt that the method is almost always more amazing than the effect. I am vastly more interested in the methods, skills, and preparation that goes into a trick than I am in just watching a final performance.
If not, recognize that people with other hobbies would rather appreciate a performance and then study what interests them with the remaining time.
Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCFXV6o7cro
I won't reveal the method but here it is in Penn's words (from 1:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuKail7Jwwg
I once heard this described as when you hear the method of a trick, a great trick is one where you go "Ah!" with amazement instead of "Oh", disappointed.
I've thought of doing with with QR codes, but I'm not sure if it will look okay for the other players and if the qr codes won't be recognizable enough by a human to give someone unfair advantage in some situations.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0biAdmuons
I guess you also need suits, but that's only four special characters (all of which may be in more-modern OCR-libraries).
Very neat. In the video, the illicit cheating device was hidden in a phone. It is theorized that these magic trick could be used in private poker houses to cheat players.
While reading through this repo I was reminded of a project I'd heard Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox Software (creators of the Borderlands franchise) talk about wanting to make after one of the magic shows he hosted at his house in Frisco, Texas.
Randy is a huge fan of magic. He's the great nephew of Cardini and notably recently purchased the Magic Castle[1].
Lo and behold, the primary contributor to this project—Paul Nettle—is an employee at Gearbox Software[2]. What a small world! I'm so happy they've made this open source.
1. https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/the-former-magician-who-n...
2. https://github.com/nettlep
[0]: https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Pain_and_Terror?file=Pai...
The secret? Amazing dumb luck.
There is one deceivingly simple trick that is essentially just that.
Setup: shuffle an imaginary deck, fan the imaginary deck, tell someone to pick an imaginary card and remember it, shuffle it back into the imaginary deck and put the deck in your pocket.
Remove a deck from your pocket, ask what the card was, fan the deck out, and - it's the only upside down card in the deck!?
So this is a cool example of the second type. All three types require some showmanship, and good patter. Some of the best tricks combine the types.
Mechanical involves some training and skill to exercise well.
But above all I put the sleight of hand as the hardest to execute but the best when done well, especially added as flourish on top of the others.
https://www.markedcardsshop.com/collections/poker-analyzer
There is a corresponding custom phone that has a hidden camera on the side (facing the deck) that then communicates with some haptic feedback that the cheater is wearing.
https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-en...
https://nettlep.github.io/magic/
Still, compared to other possibilities, you take what you can get.
The bar-code and shipping container are probably some of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, and unlike a shipping container it's completely appropriate and accessible to individuals for messing around with projects.
(no, your shipping container home is not actually a good idea)
Deleted Comment
I wouldn't necessarily expect the monitor to be visual as card tricks usually just need knowledge of a couple of cards. This could be communicated through sound (e.g. discrete earpiece or bone conduction headphones) or even haptics (e.g. Morse code vibrations from a phone in a pocket).
As for the scanner, it'll depend on the trick, the goal is just to hide a camera. It could be concealed in a prop or an item of clothing. The scanning could even be incorporated into the trick, for example by sealing the cards immediately in a "safe".
Now you only have to come up with some impressive card trick that seems impossible to pull off with conventional methods.
Of course you could also come up with a better method to communicate the information than an ipad screen. Maybe a tactile signal.