“Card Trick”

“I love to perform a card trick. I have a deck of cards and a deck of playing cards. I lay them out like this. Cards on the bottom, then ace up top. The trick is to have your audience guessing which card is the ace. So what I do is turn the playing cards so they don't face up. So the bottom card is the ace, and the top card is a nine. Okay, what I want you to do is count the cards. Here I'll do one on my right hand, but I want you to do it with your left. So all you have to do is count your right hand, then count your left. I'm going to flip them over, you're going to count, then I'll flip them over again. And all you need to do is to say “Oh look. I got another one.” Say that four times, and you'll know which one is the ace. I'll let you go ahead and do this on your own.”

The AI Jerx

Lemonade From Lemons Week: Day Five — The Jerx

[I’d like you to bear in mind that this is old news. Purposive AI has been designing magic tricks since 2017, clearly the process has been optimised by 2021- How Artificial Intelligence Is Improving Magic Tricks | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine ]

Ok, well, this was probably the easiest competition I’ve ever entered. Simply, I asked my own AI at home (GPT3) to ELI5 the Jerx’s AI for me, starting with the first effect.

Eat me, but, by the way, I couldn’t be arsed to read the whole thing so I told it to add a TLDR to the bottom which produced a simplified translation of the effect without going into a lot of theory about how the translation was produced. Don’t underestimate the value of the next tip- if you do read the whole thing I recommend using text to speech in order to listen to it instead so that you can hear the voice of an AI speaking to you. And, the same applies to reading the original Jerx articles- to an extent.

So, my AI produced the following output:

Welcome Asher. Right, allow me to break this advanced effect down for you, step by step, starting with the name of the effect and the introductory sentence. It’s important to understand that this effect confounds the average human capacity to conceptualise. The essential nature of consciousness is explored here. Even though you won’t understand this yet, there will come a time when every point of your existence will revolve around these ideas. So, let me take you on a journey. Only you can go with me to where we will travel. Nobody can take your place, nobody can face your destiny for you. Interesting times, indeed.

“Card Trick”

“I love to perform a card trick.”

The love of the performance of card tricks is the premise of Card Trick, and therefore naturally poses the question- what is a card trick? How do they really work? This is because that question is naturally attached to all card trick performances and the very theme of this illusion is directly about card trick performance, in and of itself.

Card Trick, then, may be viewed as a meta-card trick.

In my opinion, the genius here is in the name of the card trick: Card Trick.

Not only does it generally reflect and clarify the meta-nature of the effect, but, pause and think about the name for a moment, why specifically would a card trick be called Card Trick?

Well, imagine if a car manufacturer brought out a new car model named simply: Car.

This is simplicity itself, this is nothing more than the clear essence of what it means to be a car. This is a perfect and concise depiction of what it means for something to be a car. “Car” represents the quality of “carness”, so to speak.

The same applies to Card Trick. When you are dealing with a perfect and concise depiction of what it means for something to be a card trick, we are in familiar territory. The question, “what is Card Trick?” is closely related to the familiar question- “what was that card trick?”.

The answer to the two questions is essentially the same but let’s examine the precise differences.

Firstly, “what is Card Trick?”, is asking- what is the nature of all card tricks? This should be clear from the analogy of “Car/ Carness”, above.