Alphablocks and Mind Reading Dice
/A little while ago I posted a trick called Ascrabbological Sign. It was a “proof of concept” idea where you would be able to tell what astrological sign someone was thinking of based on having them concentrate on “random” scrabble letters picked from a bag, without you ever actually seeing the letters.
I never did anything with it, I just presented the concept. Well, Warwick H. has created an online tool that is kind of amazing (to me, at least). You can dump any list of (up to 16) words into it and it will shit out letter groupings you can use to do the same Ascrabbological effect with any words you want.
So, for instance, you could play a game of Scrabble with someone and take a picture of the board when you’re done. Later in the evening you could have them look at the picture and think of one of the words there, and then you could determine what they’re thinking just by having them concentrate on some randomly selected tiles.
Or ditch the scrabble tiles altogether and use the tool with slips of paper that you’ve written letters on or alphabet cards or something like that.
I’ve only played with this a little bit, but I have a feeling people are going to come up with some good uses for it. It’s sort of got a progressive anagram feel to it, but they never tell you the letters you got right. You just need to know how many you got right. So the key to creating a trick with this method is:
Having them think of some subset of words
Have some way of delivering them two “random” groupings of letters.
Have some way of determining how many letters in those groupings are in their words.
So, here’s an example.
They think of one of these cereals
You have a small, clear switch bag filled with Alpha-Bits cereal. You shake it up and dump a few random pieces into their cupped hands while you look away.
You tell them to eat any letters that appear in their cereal’s name and put the other ones aside. You do a second round of this as well. Then you have them spit in your mouth and you tell them the cereal they’re thinking of. (I didn’t say it was a good idea.)
So, to do that you would just plug the cereal name into Warwick’s tool. And you’d get this result…
Then you’d have your gimmicked bag set up to deliver them H-A-N the first round and E-L-G (or any other un-used letter) in the second round. And you’d need some sort of crib that tells you:
0 - 0 = Trix
0 - 1 = Reese’s Puffs
And so on.
I wanted to take advantage of the ability of using the tool in real time to do a trick over the phone with someone. So I called a friend of mine and I spun a story about going to a little magic gathering the previous week. “It’s almost like a magic farmer’s market. People come with tricks they’ve created and set up little folding tables and demonstrate them and sell them.”
I tell her how there’s this one guy who’s really well known for his interesting creations, but he won’t demonstrate them, and they’re really expensive and he only makes a couple of each trick. Usually he’s sold out by the time I get to his table. But this year I got there very early and they limited the number of people because of covid, so I was able to snag one of his tricks.
“I have a feeling I was totally scammed, though. The trick is called ‘Mind Reading Dice’ and it was $180 and it came in just a small paper lunch bag that was stapled closed. And when I got it home and opened it, it wasn’t some hand-crafted artisan magic trick. I swear to god, I think he just sold me some Boggle dice for $180.”
I tell her that before I make a big stink about getting my money back I want to try it out. I say that I have the instructions but it requires a somewhat long process to “calibrate” the dice and I ask if she has a little while to help me test it out. [Note: The trick doesn’t really take that long, but I wanted to set that expectation.]
I start by asking her to list some of her favorite words. Words she likes the sound of, or likes the meaning of, or just words she likes for whatever reason. Her list of words is:
SPARK
AROUSE
MEANDER
VANILLA
THIGHS
COAX
CARESS
ESPIONAGE
SERENDIPITY
PLEASE
LOVERS
PINGPONG
COCKSUCKER
As she is giving me the words, I’m silently typing them into the tool.
When she is done I tell her to think of any word and change her mind a few times before settling on a final word.
“Okay,” I say, “So now I have to remove a random number of dice and roll them. I’ll read to you the letters that come up and you just keep in mind how many of those letters are in the word you’re thinking of. We’re going to have to do this a bunch of times. Maybe 15-20. So try to stay with me.”
She hears me dump a bunch of dice on the table.
“Okay, Round 1. The letters are: I… N…O…U…Y. How many did we get?”
“I-N-O-U-Y? Uhm, just one.”
Shake. Roll.
“Round 2. The letters are C-E-L-R. How many this time?”
“None.”
“Ha. We’re getting worse. Great. These are clearly just Boggle dice. I can’t believe this. Whatever. Here we go. Round 3.”
Shake. Roll.
“Okay… so we’ve got a… holy shit! Was this?… This was one of your words! [quietly] You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. [normal voice] If this is what you’re thinking of I’m going to lose my shit. Hold on. Let me take a picture.”
I take a picture of the dice I just rolled (wink-wink) and text it to her. “Wait,” I say. “Before you look at the picture. What word were you thinking of?”
“Thighs,” she says.
“What the fuuuuccccckkkkk,” she hears my voice slowly fade away as I run away from my phone, like a Blaine spectator.
On her end, she looks at the picture and I can hear her scream coming out of my phone from across the room.
I wasn’t expecting a huge reaction to this, but it went over surprisingly well. Here are, I think, some of the elements that made it work so well.
It used her own words that she came up with.
I said that we were in for a long process. I didn’t say what that process was, but the implication was that whatever was going to happen was going to be some time down the road. So the fact that the dice “read her mind” so quickly made it extra surprising. The idea that you could find some pattern in the letters of the words over many rounds of this game, isn’t very far-fetched. But with just two rounds, and their words, I think it becomes much more impossible.
I pinned the magic on someone else. It wasn’t me reading their mind. It was a trick that we were experiencing together.
The sound of dice hitting the table—even over the phone—is very distinctive. It’s very easy to “see” what you’re hearing. A lot of things look random and haphazard, but dice hitting the table sounds random and haphazard. So I think that helped paint the picture that I’m calling out random letters.
I did, in fact, use a set of Boggle dice for this. I had a small handful of dice that I was rolling for the sound, then I had the rest of the dice with common letters on top in alphabetical order off to the side. That was to help me quickly assemble her word once I knew what it was. Sort of the way a typesetter would have the letters in front of them ready to go.
I was prepared to stall after round 2 and bitch about how much money I wasted as I assembled her word on the table. But in this case, she thought of one of the shorter words and it didn’t take me long to find the letters so I was ready to go pretty quickly.
This was fun to perform. The story of maybe getting suckered at some weird magic flea market is a pretty good one. And the process of having them name their favorite words is rich territory for interaction. And the unexpectedly early conclusion is strong.
If you have any ideas using this technique and Warwick’s tool, feel free to pass them along.
For now I’m calling this technique Alphablocking (because it uses blocks of letters… clever, Andy!). What I’m wondering, however, is does this already have a name? Did I make up this technique? I doubt it, because it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I’d be the first to come up with. But while I can see a relation to other techniques used in magic/mentalism, I don’t think I know of something that’s exactly the same. If you have some credits/history for this, let me know.
And finally, thanks to Warwick H. for creating this online tool. Unlike you and I, Warwick is one of those smart guys. If you have an idea in mind that your dumb ass can’t really take any further, Warwick made this kind offer in an email to me….
“Since I enjoy working on solving these kinds of problems/puzzles so much, I'd like to make an open invitation to your readers to get in touch if they need any similar problems solved for their magic (I'm mostly thinking of the kind of thing where a computer chugging through combinations in a smart way might be expected to have an advantage over a human, but all enquiries welcome). Contact details are on the website.”