OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

Thwarting a magician in my sleep

This story is in three parts: the dream sequence, the semi-conscious analysis, and the fully alert follow-up.

The Dream Sequence

This was part of a dream I had last night.

“I will read your mind!” boasted the mentalist. “You can pick a colour, or a flower, or an element of the periodic table, write it down, show it to the audience and seal it in an envelope. Then I will read your mind and predict what it says! In fact, you could write any English word, and I will predict it.”

The Semi-Conscious Analysis

This stream of thought all occurred in a jetlag-induced, still-half-in-the-dream-state haze, before I opened my eyes.

So, how does this guy’s trick work? How could you ensure that he couldn’t bluff you?

It could be one of those tricks where people choose apparently random things in non-random ways. You know, like the “elephant in Denmark” trick.

I bet most people looking at a periodic table would choose one of the Actinides. Or Hydrogen. I would choose Lithium; that should be hard to predict.

Did I mention that I wasn’t exactly lucid when I was thinking this?

Hmmm… but he would accept any English word. So he might have a trick slate, pen or envelope that allows him to see what you wrote – I would take my own pen and paper on stage if he selected me as a volunteer.

Sure! Any magician would just let you do that if it would ruin his trick! I’m worse than the naive people who want to interrupt halfway through a card trick to shuffle the deck!

No, the most likely way this trick would work would be to have an accomplice in the audience secretly signalling what the word was.

I know how to test this hypothesis. I would write down one word and show it to the audience, and then surreptitiously modify the word before I put it in the envelope. If he predicted the word I showed to the audience, I would suspect a stooge.

I would need to make the change easy to make – like a single stroke of the pen. For example, you could change an “o” to an “a” with a single stroke so if I wrote “fool” and showed it to the audience, I could quickly change it to “foal” before I stashed it in the envelope.

I need to come up with a list of simple modifications to letters.

When I was still half-asleep, this was beyond me, but now I would suggest:

  1. c→a, d or q;
  2. i→j;
  3. l→b, d, k or t;
  4. n→m;
  5. o→a, b, d, g, p, q;
  6. u→y;
  7. v→w;

I am sure it would be possible possible to think up with twice as many mappings, especially with ingenuity with the hand-writing.

But what if the stooge saw me do it? He or she might figure out that I changed it to “foal” and signal that in the message.

So, I would need to come up with a list of words that could be changed to multiple other words through a choice of single letter modifications.

Then the stooge couldn’t tell, all the way from the audience, which possible word I had changed it to.

Again, my conscious mind points out that the original example of I thought of – fool→foal – fits the bill here too. I could have made the change fool→foot.

Here’s the puzzle: which English base word could generate the most variants?

Fully Alert Follow-Up

“Cool!” I thought, when I woke up properly. “I have dreamt another puzzle. I haven’t done that since the Name Game… oh wait. This is the same damn puzzle. The vocabulary is the English language, rather than first names. The “typos” are now unidirectional “character modifications”. But it has the same solution as the Name Game.

Oh well.


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