anthrosciguy

Some people have more curiousity about the world around them than others, and/or are less frightened by finding things they don't know and figuring them out. The uncurious and the frightened are prone to believing in magic and miracles as alternate explanations as it at least eliminates the need for curiousity (they'd be frightened by life either way).

premjan

It worked perfectly for more than 5 trials for me. I am very alarmed. How the hell does it work? I can't see that there is any possible trick that could do this.

OK, having read the explanation it makes sense: they change the symbols on every run.

Infinite_Rules

Pretty cool trick, I wonder who thought of it..

hclincha

Someone who wanted to prove telepathy works?

Sounds more like a trick a math professor or teacher would pull on his/her students

Plognark

It's just a funny little math trick based on intervals of nine

-RRH-

When I was a kid, I saw a magician who did something like this on the TV. He had a series of numbers around him on the screen, and he "read my mind," but only after making me perform some arithmetic on my number. I didn't figure out the specifics of the trick, but everyone was watching the same show as me, so I knew the arithmetic could only lead to one result.

Ghost Of Lectricity

There's a lot of cool math tricks based on this. Notice how all of the numbers listed above by reddish are congruent to 0 mod 9.
Here's another based on the same idea, tell a friend to write write down any multi-digit natural number (integers >0) and not show it to you. Tell them to then rearrange the numbers that they just wrote down into another natural number and subtract the smaller of the two numbers that they have from the larger one. Tell them to circle one non zero digit from the new number and add the remaining uncircled digits to get their final number. Have them tell you this number. From there simply figure out what you would need to add to their number to made it a multiple of 9 (congruent to 0 mod 9).

an example: first number: 74325, rearrange to get 27453. subtract 74325- 27453= 46872. (note that 4+6+8+7+2=27 = 9*3). now let's say that I circle the 6. then i add the uncircled numbers to get 4+8+7+2=21. note then that 21+6 is congruent to 0 mod 9. thus 6 must have been the number circled. :thumbs:

OdysseusTheInnkeeper

Has anyone ever seen the bumber sticker "think honk if your a telepath"?

Blackcat

You know it's just "for fun" when the supposed "mind reading" isn't used to make keyboards, mice, tablets, touchscreens and joysticks obselete