Card curiosities. Effective trick and its solution

EFFECTIVE FOCUSES AND THEIR CLUES
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Card curiosities. Focus secret

Spectacular tricks and their clues

Directory / Spectacular tricks and their clues

The first and perhaps the only philosopher who condescended to consider card tricks was the American Charles Peirce. In one of his articles (see The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931, vol. 4, p. , using his terminology, on "cyclic arithmetic".

Two such tricks he describes in detail under the title "first curiosity" and "second curiosity." For modern man, these tricks are curious because of the sensations completely not intended by Peirs.

"The first curiosity" is based on Fermat's theorem. It took 13 pages just to describe the way it was demonstrated, and an additional 52 pages were taken up with an explanation of its essence. And although Peirce reports the "constant interest and amazement of the public" caused by his trick, the climactic effect of this trick seems so out of proportion to the complexity of the preparations that it is hard to believe that the audience did not fall asleep long before the end of his demonstration.

In the transition from the last century to ours, card tricks have been intensively studied and developed. The most revolutionary change was associated with the invention of new "slates" (methods of secret card manipulation), but improvements could also be seen in the emergence of hundreds of new tricks based entirely or in part on mathematical principles. Since 1900, card tricks have been constantly improved, and nowadays there are countless tricks that are not only witty, but also very interesting for the audience.

The following example will show how, as a result of the transformation of an old trick, its amusement has increased enormously. V.V. Rose Ball, in her 1892 book Mathematical Recreations, describes the following effect:

Sixteen cards are laid out on the table face up in the form of a square, four cards in a row. Someone is invited to think of one card and tell the demonstrator in which vertical row it lies. Then the cards are collected with the right hand in vertical rows and sequentially stacked in the left hand. After that, the cards are again laid out in the form of a square sequentially along the horizontals; thus, cards that were originally laid out in the same vertical row now appear in the same horizontal row. The demonstrator needs to remember which of them contains the now conceived card.

Again the spectator is asked to indicate in which vertical row he sees his card. It is clear that after this the demonstrator can immediately indicate the intended card, which will lie at the intersection of the just named vertical row and the horizontal row in which, as is known, it should be located. The success of this trick, of course, depends on whether the spectator follows the procedure closely enough to recognize the essence of the matter.

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