Here’s a statistical card trick. As I try to explain in the video, admittedly not very clearly, the rules of the trick are as follows:
- Matteo picks a card at random from the pack. This card is unknown to me.
- I shuffle the cards and turn them over one at a time.
- As I turn the cards over, Matteo counts them in his head until he reaches that number in the sequence. As you’ll see, his card was a 5, so he counts the cards until he reaches the 5th one.
- He then repeats that process, starting with the value of the 5th card, which happened to be a 10. So, he counts – again silently – a further 10 cards. He remembers the value of that card, and counts again that many cards.
- And so on until we run out of cards.
- (Picture cards count as 10.)
- Matteo has to remember the last card in his sequence before all of the cards ran out.
- And I – the magician – have to predict what that card was.
Now take a look at the video….
[videopress R7y823SF]
How did I do it? And what’s it got to do with Statistics? I’ll explain in a future post, but as usual if you’d like to write to me with your ideas I’ll be very happy to hear from you.
