Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!usenet
From: Neil Franklin <neil@franklin.ch.remove>
Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body
Subject: Card Trick and Telepathy
Date: 30 Dec 1999 01:20:56 +0100
Organization: My own Private Self
Lines: 50
Sender: neil@chonsp.franklin.ch
Message-ID: <6uaemtnus7.fsf@chonsp.franklin.ch>
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A nice story, just happend tonight.

This evening I was with my parents at neighbors for a visit.

The neighbor showed us a nice card trick program he had recieved from
an friend via email. This program (it runs on a normal PC) claimed to
be able to read minds!

To be more precise it drew 6 playing cards (K, Q, J of different sets)
and then the user looks at one card and presses Space (allways). Then
the computer draws 5 cards, without the one that was looked at!

We tried it a few times - and yes it did that, card gone.


Now I believe in telepathy, but definitely not in computers doing it!

So my first thought was, that in reality the human chosing a card my
be using precognition, even if the programs writer is pretending
telepathy on his programs part.

Of course with me in the audience, I quickly broke the rules for
the obvious test: multiple of us would select a card, what would
the computer remove? So my father and I did this.

We selected - and the card I had selected disappeared, and he said
his had also! I named my choice, his was the same one! Another round
brought the same result: we both chose the same card, which promptly
disappeard.


In the meantime our host revealed the trick the program used to
pretend telepathy: The program is a classic parlor trick of distracting
the viewer: remove all 6 cards and replace them with 5 others, none of
them in the first 6 (as all are pictures it is less obvious).

So the telepathic computer was not one.


But one thing stayed left over: me and my father chosing in both tests
the same card. So there telepathy seems to have been operating.

Unfortunately we only had time for 2 test rounds, before the trick was
exposed, so we still have an with 1:36 fairly high chance of
accidentally chosing the same card. I had actually intended to do 5
rounds to nail it down. But even so it was very impressive.


--
Neil Franklin, neil@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/