The Winnowing
/Your idea of combining a gimmicked prediction prop with a secret helper with a webcam is fantastic.
It allows you to perform TV Magic Special style magic for your friends. It would be good to see more thinking using this approach since it opens the door to a new type of magic. Also - it is weirdly more practical than most types of magic since you can perform for anybody in the world without having to leave your house. And it is easy to do. I just wonder if there is some kind of ultimate Jerx style approach to this sort of concept?
One idea would be to dress up the webcam trick as a Spectator As Mindreader type effect.
Imagine this.
You email about a hundred people and ask them to make a 50/50 prediction. You then keep winnowing them down until you have somebody who has correctly predicted a 50/50 outcome 6 or 7 times in a row. This is an old stock-market scam that UF Grant has written about and that Derren Brown once built a TV special around.
Or you could email a hundred people - and ask them to make a 1 in a 100 prediction. You would get them to carry out some kind of meaningless process to provide the "imp".
One of those people emails you back all excited that they were correct. And then you use that person to go into your webcam effect. With them using the same "imp" again to correctly read your mind. —JM
Yeah, I’ve done something similar to this before, but not quite the way you’re suggesting. That’s way too much trouble to me—getting 100 people involved and then perhaps ending up wasting a good trick on someone who is like my 84th favorite person in the world.
Instead, what I did—and what I suggest—is to come at the same idea but from the other direction, and just fake it all.
Here’s what I mean…
Decide who you want to show the trick to. Then, in the morning, send them an email but put their address in the bcc field, and write as if you’re writing to a bunch of people.
“Hey everyone, I have an experiment in thought projection [or whatever you want to say] that I’m working on and I’m trying to find a compatible subject. I’m going to start simple and go on from there. I just flipped a coin. It has landed either heads or tails. I want you to imagine me flipping that coin and imagine what side it came up and reply to this email with your guess by noon today.”
A couple hours later you write back as if the person got it right and is part of a now smaller group. Your next experiment is to randomly pick a card and ask them to see if they can pick up on the suit of your card.
They write back and guess the suit. Of course you will say they got this right too.
You text them that afternoon and ask if they can hop on Skype real quick.
“Okay,” you say, “so I started this morning with 100 people. 48 got the coin toss right. And of those 48, 14 got the suit of the card right. So well done. Now I’m going to ramp up the difficulty a little. On the other side of this post-it pad, I have a number between 1 and 10.”
And you do some sort of simple nail-writing thing and they will once again be “correct.” This time they actually see they’re correct in real time. And since this is a more unlikely thing to get right (compared to the coin or the suit of the card), it kind of validates those “experiments” even though they didn’t actually witness their guesses being accurate.
Now you sign off. Tell them you have a few more people to test, but you’ll get back to them later that night.
A few hours later you hook back up with them via video chat. Tell them they were one of two people to get everything right so far, but the other guy fizzled out on the final test. And then you hit them with the truly impossible routine where they accurately intuit a drawing that’s on a folded paper in a clear box or whatever.
So you get the strength of that impossible effect, but that gets amplified by the fact that it was the culmination of this event that unfolded throughout the day.
It’s essentially the opposite of the Derren Brown/UF Grant thing mentioned in JM’s email. There you have a large group of people who each assume they’re the only person involved. Here you have one person who thinks they’re part of a larger group.
By letting it ramp up during the day, you raise the stakes for everything. And it’s a way to make your spectator feel extra special as being the “one person out of 100” that this all worked out for.