How do you predict national lottery numbers?

[Rye]

Any ideas how the Hell he did that?

More on it here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... mbers.html

[2000AD]

My guess is a tiny display in each of the balls with a wireless connection to tell them what to say.

[Alferd Packer]

My guess is a tiny display in each of the balls with a wireless connection to tell them what to say.

While I might say differently if I saw it at a higher resolution, I'm inclined to say this, too. The balls were rigged to display whatever numbers came up, and Mr. Brown stalled for time by writing them down and being his charming, rogueish self.

[Keevan_Colton]

Well all you need to do is tune in tomorrow night when the follow up show is on and he explains how...

[andrewgpaul]

My guess is a tiny display in each of the balls with a wireless connection to tell them what to say.

While I might say differently if I saw it at a higher resolution...

The 4OD stream seemed to be better quality than that Youtube clip:

[CaptainChewbacca]

Got to be a display trick or something. I don't doubt DB is a brilliant man, the thing where he beat a room full of chess masters by himself proved that, but the man is clearly not clairvoyant.

[Rye]

Well all you need to do is tune in tomorrow night when the follow up show is on and he explains how...

Yeah, but I wanted to see how the various mathemagicians and such on here would go about trying something similar.

[Zac Naloen]

I think it was a elaborate camera trick with a split freeze frame personally.


Derren was unnaturally still as the results were read out.

[Lagmonster]

Got to be a display trick or something. I don't doubt DB is a brilliant man, the thing where he beat a room full of chess masters by himself proved that, but the man is clearly not clairvoyant.

The 'playing ten games of chess at once and winning at least as many as you lose' bit isn't magic; it's an old con going back to the 20's. I didn't see this one in action, mind, so he might have pulled a variation of it to make it more impressive.

[Teebs]

Got to be a display trick or something. I don't doubt DB is a brilliant man, the thing where he beat a room full of chess masters by himself proved that, but the man is clearly not clairvoyant.

The 'playing ten games of chess at once and winning at least as many as you lose' bit isn't magic; it's an old con going back to the 20's. I didn't see this one in action, mind, so he might have pulled a variation of it to make it more impressive.

He had an odd number of people, played the grandmaster's against each other and then beat the head of a university chess club using his own skill.

[Lagmonster]

Got to be a display trick or something. I don't doubt DB is a brilliant man, the thing where he beat a room full of chess masters by himself proved that, but the man is clearly not clairvoyant.

The 'playing ten games of chess at once and winning at least as many as you lose' bit isn't magic; it's an old con going back to the 20's. I didn't see this one in action, mind, so he might have pulled a variation of it to make it more impressive.

He had an odd number of people, played the grandmaster's against each other and then beat the head of a university chess club using his own skill.

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

[Spoonist]

The depressing part is how this is being reported by the media. "If he had played that series he could have won!". No he could not since its a trick. DB has been quite clear that he is a sceptic and an illusionist.

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

Well, uhm, the variation was as Teebs said that it was one extra person. He won 6/11 not 5/10. While the 10 grandmasters where in effect playing each other as demonstrated by DB at the end of the show, he left with the comment to this effect "but how did I beat the eleventh guy?"
Which was a real nice ending.

[CaptainChewbacca]

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

I didn't say it was magic, I said it was an impressive mental feat to remember four different games simultaneously and not get them confused.

[Rye]

Hah, that was fucking great. He spun a yarn about The Wisdom of Crowds and also nudge-nudge wink-wink suggested he "could've" tampered with the lottery machine itself by having an insider and hypnotising the guards. So that's how you do it.

[Ford Prefect]

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

Could you explain this trick to me? I'm not familiar with it.

[Darth Wong]

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

Could you explain this trick to me? I'm not familiar with it.

You let the first guy make his move, then you copy his move against the second guy, etc. In effect, you make them play against each other.

[Teebs]

Well, uhm, the variation was as Teebs said that it was one extra person. He won 6/11 not 5/10. While the 10 grandmasters where in effect playing each other as demonstrated by DB at the end of the show, he left with the comment to this effect "but how did I beat the eleventh guy?"
Which was a real nice ending.

The notable thing was that the 11th guy was a significantly weaker player than the others. Captain of a university chess club or something rather than an international grand master.

I've always liked Derren Brown because he is so clear that he uses trickery and psychology rather than trying to bullshit people.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, uhm, the variation was as Teebs said that it was one extra person. He won 6/11 not 5/10. While the 10 grandmasters where in effect playing each other as demonstrated by DB at the end of the show, he left with the comment to this effect "but how did I beat the eleventh guy?"
Which was a real nice ending.

The notable thing was that the 11th guy was a significantly weaker player than the others. Captain of a university chess club or something rather than an international grand master.

I've always liked Derren Brown because he is so clear that he uses trickery and psychology rather than trying to bullshit people.

Of course, you still have to be fairly smart, if not supergenius-grade, to keep the moves straight and to be confident of beating the university chess club captain. It's a con, but a con that only works because you are smart, if not as smart as the con makes you appear: my favorite type.

[Darth Holbytlan]

I found a 7-part YouTube video of the "explanation" here. It'll probably get taken down, soonish.

Here's a summary:

First, he describes his options:

1. Fake a Lottery Ticket
2. Genuinely Predict the Numbers
3. Fix the Machine

He dismisses the first quickly, and spends most of the program discussing option 2, no doubt since option 1 is the way he actually did the trick.

He picks a mouse-phobic person from the crowd, shows her four covered cages with numbered cards in front, and tells her one has a mouse hidden inside and that its card has a picture of one on the back. Then has her pick a cage at random and stick her hand in. Then he show that the card was blank on the back, then has her repeat with the remaining cages. After three correct (mouse-less) guesses, he shows that all the cages are empty, but reveals that the card in front of the unpicked cage has a picture of a mouse printed on the back. He claims all of this is to show how emotion can be used to influence people's choices.

Then he shows a video of him performing a similar trick, only with a volunteer stamping 14 of 20 numbered styrofoam cups with his bare feet. Derren tells him that there is an upwards facing knife under one cup, placed under one Derren thinks he won't pick. He's offered a check for 500.000£, which Derren seals in an envelope and hands to the participant, as insurance should he pick the wrong one. Some paramedics stand by after cleaning his feet and giving him a tetenous shot. After 14 cups, he is told to unseal the check and look at the back, which has the 6 cup numbers he didn't pick written on the back. Then he's offered another chance at the money if he keeps going. He stamps all but one remaining. Derren reveals that the last cup did not have a knife under it, and that the injection was saline, telling him that it was all to generate fear. Derren reveals a mouse hidden under the last cup.

Then Derren talks about psychic influence on physical events, and shows a video of him playing Penney's game against a participant. Derren picks a 3-toss-long heads/tails sequence after the participant, and has a crowd of other people put on red shirts, face paint, etc. and root for his side against the participant (in a blue shirt). One of the Red crowd tosses coins against Blue, and Derren tallies up the Red team's victories. Afterwards, Derren explains how to actually pull the real trick, saying it works because of "deep maths", and that the psychic stuff was nonsense.

Derren gives a quick overview of Galton's "wisdom of crowds" discovery, then describes how a group of 24 participants each pick 6 lottery numbers after studying the past year's worth of picks. The results are averaged over all participants for each number. Then they played those numbers, but only got one right. So, Derren says, he tried to remove emotion (greed) as an influence. He shows a video where the participants pick numbers again, but they are not going to even average them until the results are announced. Six participants (one per ball) come up, collect the numbers, then average them after the results. This time they get 3/6 right, in no particular order.

Derren talks a bit about putting the participants through bonding exercises (tug-of-war and the like), with video, then moves on to another video where they add "automatic writing" to supposedly further remove conscious influence. The participants let their mind wander and just draw whatever they feel like with eyes closed. Too-high numbers, negative numbers, and scrawls are all OK. One participant is pulled out to pick through all of the sheets, write down the numbers, and average them. The results are announced while he is writing down numbers. This time they get the last four right, and in order.

For the main event, the group does the same thing, only this time Derren collects the writing, and puts the balls in the tube and seals them. He does not show what the picks were ahead of time. Show the crowd getting very excited as the results are displayed to them.

Finally, Derren goes through a spiel about option 3 (remember them), about how he could have rigged the lottery with the help of an inside person, hypnosis, and multiple sets weighted copies of the lottery balls substituted before and after the pick. But, as he says, it would be illegal, so he certainly wouldn't admit to any of it and definitely didn't do it that way. So he'll just say it was a trick.

[Darth Holbytlan]

My analysis:

Using psychology to predict/force a number choice on someone is a well-known magic effect, but in the case of the mouse, Derren could probably have forced the last card to have a mouse, since he's the one who picked up and showed the card. For the styrofoam cups trick, I don't know if he did use psychology to get the set of six numbers, but he was commenting on the guy's progress throughout (e.g. "Three left."). Mentioning numbers during the process is part of the technique to influence people's choices. For the last five, the mouse could have been put under the last one using slight-of-hand.

For the lottery averaging trick (where they got 3/6 right) I suspect that the talliers knowing the results may have influenced them to round in a way to help the results. Derren may also have run the experiment with multiple sets of participants, and just picked the ones with better results. After adding automatic writing, the participants themselves won't know what they wrote (at least the random scribbles) or the order, which gives the tallier much more flexibility to interpret the writing to match the correct results. Maybe this was unconscious, but I'd bet on a plant, personally.

For the actual trick, I agree that it was probably a split screen. It explains why there was no audience, why Derren stayed out of the way of the left side of the video, why there was camera shake at all (added digitally to hide what was going on), and why the 37 ball seems to shift slightly.

[Simon_Jester]

Then he shows a video of him performing a similar trick, only with a volunteer stamping 14 of 20 numbered styrofoam cups with his bare feet. Derren tells him that there is an upwards facing knife under one cup, placed under one Derren thinks he won't pick. He's offered a check for 500.000£, which Derren seals in an envelope and hands to the participant, as insurance should he pick the wrong one.

Half a million pounds? Hell, I'd probably accept getting stabbed in the foot for that kind of payoff. That's a pretty good deal to me.

[TheKwas]

So, no variation on the old con, then. That one's been pulled by Harry Anderson in his heyday and he hardly invented it.

Well, uhm, the variation was as Teebs said that it was one extra person. He won 6/11 not 5/10. While the 10 grandmasters where in effect playing each other as demonstrated by DB at the end of the show, he left with the comment to this effect "but how did I beat the eleventh guy?"
Which was a real nice ending.

You're all forgetting the variation. He told us in the episode how he did the trick and how he beat the eleventh player (he was simply better than him in chess), but what he also did which is mindblowing is predict the number of pieces left on each chessboard.

Before he started playing the game, he gave a piece of paper to one of the grandmasters and told him not to look at it or fiddle with it. At the end, he pulled out the paper and it contained the number of chess pieces left on each board, which (I assume?) would be impossible to do if they were actually playing against each other.

This part he never explains, but rather says "I forget" right after bragging about the memory required to have the grandmasters play each other.

[TheKwas]

Sorry for the double post, but I'm just watching the explanation videos now and have some comments:

Using psychology to predict/force a number choice on someone is a well-known magic effect, but in the case of the mouse, Derren could probably have forced the last card to have a mouse, since he's the one who picked up and showed the card.

I doubt it, it would have been some extremely good slight-of-hand.

What I'm fairly certain he's doing is what he says he's doing: using suggestion. An acute observer who has a fairly good idea of how suggestion can work will note that before each time she picks a box, Brown will recount the remaining boxes and their number in order, meaning that the number '4' is last and he slows down when saying the number '4' and subltly puts emphasis on that number. Infact, I noticed it before the woman picked any box and immediately guessed that the mouse was in box number 4.

Generally speaking, the human mind will think about the last anything said or shown in a squence, as you don't have time to really absorb the information from earlier items because the squence is going by too fast. David Blaine opened one of his Street magic episodes by flipping through an entire deck of cards in front of the camera and told the audience to pick out any card randomly from the deck. He then predicted that everyone picked out the Ace of Diamonds, which just so happened to be the last card of the deck. I can't find the video unfortunately, but if anyone remembers it, it's a great illustration of this principal.

For the mouse trick I imagine he's using similar techniques throughout the exercise, although much more advanced and subtle. The last 5 I noticed he said "That's three" and "1 left", while the mouse was under 13 (that's three) and he picked 1 instead of 13 at the end (1 left), but I'm less certain of this trick.


As for the actual explanation as to how he predicted the lottery numbers, both of his explanations strike me as bogus. It was simply a magic trick.

[Duckie]

That's Derren Brown's modus anyhow- at least two other times he's given an explanation of a trick that in fact disguises the real trick or gives a false explanation. He's not going to give away how he does these things if a fake explanation sounds better anyhow.