Engineers at Queen Mary University London fed data about the structure of certain magic tricks and their efficacy, the “artificial intelligence” generated new variations on a self-working puzzle trick and a smartphone-based mind-reading illusion.
The journal Frontiers In Psychology published their scientific paper, titled “Magic in the machine: a computational magician’s assistant.”
“Computer intelligence can process much larger amounts of information and run through all the possible outcomes in a way that is almost impossible for a person to do on their own,” researcher Howard Williams told Wired UK. “So while a member of the audience might have seen a variation on this trick before, the AI can now use psychological and mathematical principles to create lots of different versions and keep audiences guessing.”
