Fooling Houdini, page 25
The library’s second-oldest volume is the medieval Latin pseudepigraphon The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages. In it, the author—probably one of St. Magnus’s students—describes hundreds of extraordinary properties of animals, herbs, and stones, some of which can be used to make magic. Among them is a method for resurrecting a drowned fly by burying it in ashes, which to a naïve audience looks like a miracle even today. The secret lies in the fact that insects breathe through tiny openings in their exoskeletons. Submerging a fly in water cuts off its oxygen supply, causing it to pass out. The ashes in turn dry it off, allowing the fly to breathe again, effecting an apparent resurrection. Thus, this trick doubles as an early entomological experiment.
The Book of Secrets belongs to a class of vernacular literature that was popular in Europe during the fifteenth century and endured well into the Elizabethan age. As Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and printing presses spread across the Continent, so-called books of secrets—bizarre medleys of magic, bestiary,* metallurgy, recipes, tinctures and elixirs, and some actual scientific facts—became commonplace. From our modern vantage point, it’s easy to dismiss most of this stuff as hokum. But empirical science was born out of these ungainly mash-ups.
Today we tend to view magic and science as polar opposites, with superstition at one end and rationality at the other. But this is a relatively recent distinction. For centuries, magic and science were widely seen as parallel paths to wisdom. Newton wrote more about the occult than any other subject, while toiling in secret over alchemical tracts that, had they been exposed, would have landed him in prison, because alchemy was deemed satanic by the Church. After his death, the Royal Society stashed away the embarrassing evidence, and for centuries these papers remained hidden, known only to a select few. Rediscovered in the mid-1900s, they reveal the striking extent to which Newton’s laws—the bedrock of physics—were shaped by theories of attraction and repulsion laid out in the alchemical cookbooks of his day. Gottfried Leibniz, coinventor of calculus, got his start as an alchemist in Nuremberg. Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, spent half his life searching for the philosopher’s stone, the legendary substance that turns lead into gold. Jan Baptista van Helmont, the occult philosopher who laid out the first useful theory of gases in the early 1700s, did so through the prism of a profoundly mystical worldview. Practically every great thinker of the scientific revolution was interested in magic.
Technical curiosity and a penchant for tinkering continued to link science and magic during the nineteenth century, albeit in a more down-to-earth way. By and large the icons of nineteenth-century magic were Edisonian types who toyed with elaborate contraptions in private laboratories and studios. The father of modern magic, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, was himself an accomplished scientist who conducted early experiments in electromagnetism and invented a number of devices for regulating electrical currents. (Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, exhibitions of electromagnetic phenomena—which were variously billed as scientific experiments and spiritual manifestations—became a common feature of entertainment magic.) Robert-Houdin also built mechanical figures and automata, including a small android that he sold to P. T. Barnum. He designed the world’s first electric burglar alarm. His famous mechanical orange tree, which blossomed real fruit, is a classic of magical engineering. Using his knowledge of magic and physics, he once quashed a tribal rebellion in French Algeria by dazzling the local chieftains with his godlike powers—a mission for which he received a royal commendation.
An amateur magician and friend of Robert-Houdin invented trick photography and created the first special-effects films. (Magic played a foundational role in the development and dissemination of movie technology.) Another nineteenth-century engineer, Henry Dircks, invented Pepper’s Ghost, an early theatrical illusion that inspired two of the most famous tales in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—the “Cheshire Cat” and “Pig and Pepper.” (An avid fan of magic, Lewis Carroll witnessed the illusion while attending a magic show with none other than Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for the Alice stories.) Other magicians invented the parachute, the first ribbonless typewriters, coin-op locks, and vending machines.
The tradition of the magician-scientist persisted even throughout much of recent history. Up until the late 1930s, magic shows were still being billed as scientific amusements or wonders of natural philosophy. And until just a few years ago, the Academy of Magical Arts, one of America’s three magic fraternities, was known as the Academy of Magical Arts and Sciences.
To the heroes of the scientific revolution, science and magic were kindred sources of wonder. More than five centuries after the first conjuring texts came into being, the art and science of magic are as vibrant and mysterious as ever. Meanwhile scientists of all stripes—be they psychologists, neurobiologists, or mathematicians—continue to look toward magic as a source of inspiration.
AS THE DAY OF THE IBM competition drew near, I began searching with ever-greater urgency for the perfect trick. My subway reading now consisted of obscure math articles, old Martin Gardner columns, books on probability and information theory I’d plucked from the math library. I managed to track down Gilbert’s original 1955 Bell Labs memo, which turned out to be as rare as issues of the Sphinx. It had never been published, and none of the dozen or so mathematicians I contacted—guys who, at one point or another, had all worked on the problem of shuffling—had ever seen a copy, including Bayer. After some serious gumshoeing, I finally located Gilbert himself. He was retired and lived in New Jersey. I reached out and touched him the old-fashioned way—by phone—and he kindly mailed me a copy.
I became a regular at Bayer’s office hours. I did card tricks for him and his grad students, which Bayer seemed to enjoy, although he did ask me on more than one occasion if I’d ever considered psychiatric treatment. Rumors began to spread of a crazy magician lurking in the halls of the math department. Walking into a symposium one afternoon, I saw Bayer nudge a professor sitting next to him and whisper, “That’s the magician.” Word traveled fast.
If Persi Diaconis is the coolest mathematician in the world, Bayer comes in a close second. A wisecracking, effervescent man of fifty-five who always wears jeans and frequently goes barefoot, with shaggy wisps of gray hair and curious green eyes, Bayer runs marathons, plays the ukulele, and climbs mountains in his spare time. In a field full of wallflowers—an extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking—Bayer is remarkably outgoing.
Listening to him talk is an exercise in mental agility, the intellectual equivalent of riding a mechanical bull. His thoughts buck and swerve and double back so quickly, often in mid-sentence, that it’s a struggle to stay on board. When he gave me a crash course on information theory, it began with a story about Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. (It made perfect sense at the time, but I’d be hard-pressed to repeat it. Also, using a slide rule is apparently a lot like playing a fretless bass.) A system for cheating at blackjack turned into an indictment of Wall Street. Why can nobody match the NSA at code breaking? Why are there so few nuclear powers? Why did the Giants fall into a losing streak after seemingly sound trades? It was all connected by the formulas he scribbled on the board. Whenever he was deep in thought—like after I showed him my Ambitious Card routine—he swirled his tongue around in his mouth and puckered his lips as if sucking on a piece of candy.
In return for entertaining him, Bayer taught me about his research, dished about Russell Crowe, and regaled me with tales of Diaconis’s exploits. One of those stories was about a trick Bayer saw Diaconis perform at, of all places, a computer science conference. Strolling into a large lecture hall, where he was scheduled to give a talk, Diaconis whipped out a deck of cards and explained to the bemused audience that he was about to show them some magic. He wrapped a rubber band around the deck and threw it across the lecture hall. “He actually made a good shot,” Bayer remembers. “It landed on the middle of this table on the other side of the room.” (Bayer also recalls that the deck seemed oddly light.) The person nearest the deck gave it a cut, and five people took cards off the top. “If you have a red card, stand up,” Diaconis instructed them. Moments later, he named all five cards in order from across the room.
After baffling a roomful of computer scientists with this trick, he proceeded to baffle them further with an abstract lecture on something called the theory of finite fields. “This was deep modern algebra,” Bayer said. “I mean you can take an entire year of algebra, and minor in it, and not understand the talk. I didn’t, and I teach that course.”
The trick Bayer witnessed was a version of something known as the Tossed-out Deck, a classic of card mentalism wherein a deck is thrown into the audience, cards are selected, and the magician names the cards under seemingly impossible circumstances. It’s a nice effect because it engages multiple spectators, and the act of tossing the deck out into the crowd seems very fair, because of the distance it puts between the magician and the magic. As with the Ambitious Card and the cups and balls, many great magicians have tackled the Tossed-out Deck, and there are dozens of methods.
But pretty much every method has at least two flaws. First, the deck won’t stand up to close examination, unless you switch decks after the fact. Second, the magician usually needs to fish for clues in order to zero in on the cards. (“I sense a high card. Is it a seven or above? Is it an odd card?”) In capable hands, these are minor issues, but they are flaws nonetheless.
Diaconis’s version was pristine. Aside from being a little light, the deck was ungaffed, meaning there were no repeating banks of cards or marks on the backs. Furthermore, there was no fishing. Diaconis didn’t ask a single question before naming all five cards. He merely instructed the people with red cards to stand up. How could he have learned the identity of all five cards from this information alone? It was too good to be true. If I could learn this trick, I’d be a god among men. Or at least a man among little kids.
The secret, it turned out, was rooted in an obscure mathematical principle known as a De Bruijn sequence, after Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn. A De Bruijn sequence is a sequence of characters—letters or numbers or what have you—in which every possible subsequence of a given length appears once and only once. Consider, for example, the following string of eight letters: RRRBRBBB. This is a binary De Bruijn sequence of order 3. Binary means that the “alphabet” from which the sequence is composed contains only two elements (R and B), and it’s of order 3 because every possible three-letter subsequence—RRR, RRB, RBR, BRB, RBB, BBB, BBR, BRR—appears once and only once. For instance, the three-letter subsequence RBR, which starts on the third letter of the string and ends on the fifth, doesn’t appear anywhere else in the sequence.
This particular sequence is also said to be cyclic, because when you get to the far right end, you loop back around to the far left, as if you were hitting the carriage return on a typewriter. In other words, the subsequence BRR starts with the last letter on the right (B), continues at the far left (R), and ends on the second letter from the left (R). It helps to picture a circle:
The oldest-known De Bruijn sequence appears in Sanskrit, in a 3,000-year-old fragment of Vedic poetry. These days, engineers use De Bruijn sequences to build smarter robots, neuroscientists use them to study how the brain encodes a stream of sensory input, programmers apply them to game design, and cybercriminals use them to hack open electronic locks protected by numerical key codes like those found on many luxury cars.
The De Bruijn sequence can also be weaponized to create mind-blowing magic. To see how, imagine that R stands for a red card and B for a black card and that I have a packet of eight cards in the following order: Q, 3, A, 4, 2, 3, 2, 7. This corresponds to the color sequence shown in the circle, with the queen of hearts at twelve o’clock. Now, let’s say I remove three consecutive cards from somewhere in this eight-card packet. All I need to tell you is the color sequence, and you’ll know what cards I’ve taken. If, for example, I tell you that the colors are red, black, red, you know immediately that the three cards I’ve selected are A, 4, and 2, because that’s the only sequence of red, black, red in the string. And because the sequence is cyclic, the deck can be cut as many times as you like. All cutting does is change the starting point on the circle.
With only eight cards it’s not a very strong trick, but imagine doing it with lots of cards. Persi Diaconis used a thirty-two-card packet, hence the “light deck” Bayer had observed. It was still amazing, but I decided I wanted to take it to the next level and do it with a full regulation deck, one that could be freely examined. Evidently, nobody had ever done this before. Which meant that if I cracked the code to this one effect, I’d be the only person in the world able to perform it.
I teamed up with a grad student I met through Bayer, a woman named Nava, who was also interested in magic, and we wrote a computer program to find a suitable fifty-two-card sequence. Then I arranged a deck of cards in order according to this color pattern. Next I had to memorize the order of the cards. If this sounds like a lot of memorization, that’s because it is. The trick is mentally demanding, but that’s the price you pay for such a perfect trick. (As magicians like to say, every miracle has a price.) It also has the virtue of its defect, because this complexity helps disguise the method. Even if someone were to figure out the underlying principle—and that’s a stretch—most people would probably have a hard time imagining that anyone could commit so much information to memory. Maybe this is why magicians have been using stacked decks and mnemonic systems since the sixteenth century. As Jamy Ian Swiss aptly put it, “One of the best-kept secrets we have as magicians is that laymen would never imagine we would work so hard to fool them.”
Even had I not smoked a lot of pot in college, memorizing this much information without some kind of cognitive aid would have been daunting, so I consulted former U.S.A. Memory Champion Joshua Foer, an expert on mnemonics and author of the book Moonwalking with Einstein. He taught me an amazing technique, called the method of loci, which can endow even the wimpiest brain with superhuman powers of recall. The technique works by tapping into the near-limitless depths of spatial memory. Contrary to popular belief, photographic memory is not solely the province of savants. Everyone has a photographic memory. Most people just don’t know how to access it. The method of loci takes you there.
The basic idea is to store memories as images inside an imaginary space known as a memory palace. To memorize a deck of cards, for example, you first associate each card with an image—usually a person, object, or action. I chose to use people. The four of clubs, for instance, was Penn Jillette. (I made all the fours magicians.) The five of diamonds was Richard Feynman. (Fives were scientists.) The eight of clubs was Shaquille O’Neal. (Eights were athletes.)
After assigning an image to each card, you install the images at different points (or loci) along a predetermined path through your memory palace. Any kind of place will work, although it’s best to use one that’s familiar to you, such as your home or office. I chose the house I grew up in. You also want to pick a route that’s easy to retrace. I decided to follow the left wall, from the entryway to the dining room, through the kitchen, and into my parents’ bedroom, then into the living room, my dad’s study, my bedroom, and finally the garage.
By placing the images in your memory palace, you’re effectively encoding the order of the cards as a set of spatial relationships inside your mind. Later on, when you want to remember them, you simply retrace your steps through this virtual world. Strange as it may seem, the images appear in your mind almost effortlessly. The system is also remarkably robust. Once the images are fixed in your memory palace, they tend to stay there until you consciously evict them.
It may sound like a lot of work—why memorize more than you need to?—but the counterintuitive thing about memory is that more is often easier to remember than less. Memory is largely an associative process, and the more associations you make—particularly visual ones—the easier it is for memories to gain traction in your brain.
Once you’ve done the necessary spadework, committing a deck to memory is a breeze. It took me, a total novice, the lesser part of an evening. The world’s top mnemonists can memorize shuffled decks in under a minute. The current world record is 21.9 seconds—less time than it takes most people to deal out 52 cards. And it doesn’t work just for cards, either. The same strategy can be applied to words, letters, numbers—anything. In 2006 the World Memory Champion used it to memorize a string of 1,040 random digits in half an hour. Another well-adjusted individual has filled his memory palace with the first 65,536 digits of pi.
In addition to memorizing the order of the cards, I also had to know which color sequence each group of cards corresponded to. In the eight-card example just given, for instance, you need to know that red, black, red corresponds to A, 4, 2. The best way to remember this is to convert the subsequence red, black, red into a number (using a binary code), and then install that number inside your memory palace next to the first card in the group (in this case the A). The number effectively tells you where in your memory palace to look.
To memorize the numbers, I used another memory trick called the Major System, which turns numbers into words. The number 36, for instance, became the word mash, because in the Major System, 3 = m and 6 = sh. (You fill in the vowels yourself.) After I turned all the numbers into words, I partnered them with the cards to form new images. For example, the four of clubs, together with the number 36, became an image of Penn Jillette (4) watching the show M.A.S.H. (36).
Blame it on human nature, but it’s a well-known fact that our brains privilege lurid memories above more mundane ones. With this in mind, and following in the footsteps of champion mnemonists like Foer, I turned my memory palace into the set of a Pasolini film. In the entryway, David Duchovny (2) is consuming his own excrement (9 = poo). Physicist Richard Feynman (5) is puffing a doobie (19) at the kitchen table. Tom Cruise (10) is bleeding to death from a knife (28) wound inside the garage. Unspeakable acts are afoot in the linen closet. By the end of my virtual journey, I’d desecrated my childhood home. It was like that time during my senior year when my parents went on vacation and left me in charge for the weekend.
