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Scientists develop Phoney app to optimise magic tricks

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By Ishbel Macleod, PR and social media consultant

November 18, 2014 | 1 min read

Scientists have developed a computer program with an algorithm to optimise magic tricks and invent new ones.

Revealed in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists gave the program an outline of how a mind-reading trick works, and the results of experiments into how humans understand magic, and the system created new variants that can be performed by a magician.

Peter McOwan, a professor of computer science at Queen Mary University of London and a co-author of the paper, said: “There’s no such thing as magic. It’s just hidden science with a good performance.”

An app, named Phoney, was also developed by the scientists to allow amateurs to learn an apparently random sequence of 52 cards by heart.

McOwan added: “People weren’t as sceptical as you might think. Some people were asking if I had an X-ray scanner in my phone.”

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