IoT for Magicians — Bens Podcast

Magicians use to be on the edge of technology. Any sufficiently innovative technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's kind of what software engineering is all about. It's easy to get frustrated by technologically challenged folks who think that software is some kind of wizardry, because it makes it hard for them to appreciate the level of skill and thinking applied to solving software problems.

If you travelled back in time from any period to any previous period, the humans there would surely think whatever technology you bring is magic. Just imagine showing Jesus a cell phone, or showing an ancient Japanese warrior the gear that modern seal teams deploy with. We can divinely predict the future, we have remote vision, we can shoot lasers from our hands, we can fly through the air. Kinda magical.

Technology is magic

Magicians are not at all frustrated by this the way that programmers are. It's precisely their art. So magicians practice a technique maybe 10 thousand times and are sometimes doing the trick the impossibly hard way, just to throw you off. They are pretending to be wizards.

Their whole craft is in selling that idea. That the world does not permit the things they're doing, and yet they're doing it. Half of the craft seems to be misdirection and controlling attention, but the other half, if not more, is spending all day practicing. This is not so different from learning strange computer languages or studying physical law, or medicine, they all have the same effect, making something impossible, possible.

It's no wonder brains are so attracted to this. It's evolutionarily apt. Of course beings whose only good adaptation is thinking and remembering would develop behaviors that optimize for those traits. Cats use their claws. Sharks use their teeth. Humans use their brain meat. And I think it's that interest that is being exploited by magic shows.

Magic is not just technology

Magicians have clubs and a sort of union formed in the community. So as with all institutions, the elements which act to preserve the institution tend to be conservative in nature, kind of by definition. People tend to like things just fine how they are. Especially things they're invested in.

So when innovative competitors break into a field or a sport because they found some niche that hasn't been part of the tradition, the first reaction from the community is often negative. They don't like it. Like when Alpha-Go started playing on line 5, or when Tim Ferris started winning matches just by chucking people out of the ring.

Even if it's a fair and square victory, technically, according to the rules, people are unhappy about it, it somehow seems like cheating or something. Plus there's the added nuisance of having to rethink 3 thousand years of Go strategy.

People like cleverness

I'm sure it isn't only magicians who, when watching someone perform some wonderful trick, are a bit broken-hearted when they discover that the guy on the street was a paid actor. I hate that. And sometimes they'll say "There are no stooges used in this trick" when there actually are because it's cheap entertainment and because there are no organization regulating those kinds of claims on television.

Deception isn't a magic trick

The tricks can only be done by someone who has spent an incredible amount of time practicing are far more pleasing than $5 plastic tricks. If you start your cheap trick by saying "This box does not hide the quarter when I turn a knob or anything" then sure, that's maximally selling the trick, but there's nothing wondrous about it.

That's not a trick, that's just lying

We see this in youtube "pranks" too, like when someone will tell their girlfriend that the cat is dead and then after recording her crying for a few minutes shout "Sike! Pranked you! Haha" and it seems to me like that's not a prank. It's just a mean lie.

But putting clear tape across a doorway...

That's a prank. I mean -- it gets old quickly, but it's a hilarious idea. And the point is that the secret behind the trick is just -- but clear tape on a doorway.

The puzzle is not the trick

A well crafted trick should not fall apart by suspicion of robots. Teller from Penn and Teller has a trick which is impossible to dismantle. Most of the time I can at least reduce the trick into what mechanics are involved. I have no idea how he does this and I don't know if I really want to. It's so beautiful.

The puzzle is the truth

Teller never tells a lie. He never says a word. He just pulls you into a fantasy land where wonderful things can happen. Things that you would never imagine happening. Things that you can't believe might happen, and yet there they are in front of your face. There's something possible and true behind the illusion and that's the stuff that scientists focus on, and it probably turns out to be totally boring.

Blurring the lines between chaos and order

Bridging the gap between modern tech and magic tricks might make people think that some of the down right miracles that magicians perform are not the brilliant perfection of a skill, but just some robot behind the scenes. But it also opens up a whole new universe of potential and unchains creativity.

There's a reason magicians would lie, of course. Saying they've never met the guy in front of them who just happened to pick exactly the right card allows them to practice charisma and delivery instead of skill, and the unobservant audience is none the wiser. And while I think we all agree that lying and calling it magic is an asshole thing to do, what about actually creating the technology that allows for those things?

Why don't we see cooler technology in magic?

It seems like there is very little overlap between the people who are deeply interested in magic, and those who are deeply interested in technology. This may be in part because even if you're a hobbyist magician, some quick math reveals that being paid $50 / hour to practice writing software is more lucrative than hoping to be one day be practiced enough, and lucky enough to feed your family by shuffling cards.

I searched only a little but couldn't find any open source platforms or Arduino kits or anything really towards this purpose. And that me me think about how those two occupations are on opposing ends of the introvert / extravert continuum.

I know many electrical engineers. None of them are the kind of people that would want to be center stage. Some of them don't even like lecturing.

Dark, magical forces at work in the world.

When a magician says "Yes, but this is a magic cup -- with a genie in it -- who gives us as many foam balls as we want" he is just setting up for his trick and we know that he's not trying to convince us of that, because magic cups don't exist, neither do genies.

I think that's why we are surprised and impressed with his claim that strange forces are at work, because we know they aren't, and he's just mastered some set of skills. But it's so easy now to connect devices to one another, and so cheap to get magical hardware.

Modern technologies really are dark magical forces

You could make tricks without designing circuits or engineering spring-loaded collapsing bird cages. There really are magical forces at work behind the scenes to cause strange events. And I'm just so surprised that we don't magicians using them.

"Don't let people see you move the balls around"

There's always a truth behind the trick, and it's never any fun. If you read about how to do the cup and ball trick, the real one, the best you get is something like "Don't let people see you move the balls around", which doesn't detract from watching a skilled magician do this.

This example is perhaps not very imaginative but it'd be easy to build.

There are so many implications!

Imagine the ball trick, but the cups have a hidden little compartment connected to an actuator, and a microphone listening for the words "Abra cadabra." or an accelerometer triggered by three shakes, or a tap, or anything else. Then it simply releases a ball from the compartment.

You can even wildly interconnect tricks behind the scenes. Almost every common trick pattern can be replaced by or augmented with some simple technologies.

Infinite API integrations: Perhaps the cups track their positions with respect to one another, and trigger when you say "left" or "right", so you could even have a volunteer actually moving the cups around and have the cups figure out which one they are, and where to put the ball.
Naive autonomous locomotion: You could hook them all up to some API as well, maybe make it so that when you scoot one, the other scoots itself.
Voice recognition: Hell, you could have a code word trigger speech processing so when you say "Well then would you be amazed if the card in the box was the 4 of hearts?" And 1 second later, have exactly that card in the box. No slight of hand, no weirdness, just an effective illusion.
Fool Penn and Teller: If we created such a magic cup, we could be even more creative with the trick, and we could mix in some actual slight of hand, for misdirection, and then fake a bad slight of hand so the magicians in the audience would even be dumb founded when we the ball is back in the cup but there was no opportunity to sneak it under there.

Oh wait, did the patent trolls ruin this too?

Maybe it's the case that there are already patents for every conceivable such device, and that the second you get paid for a trick which uses one, you get smashed by litigation. That seems like something those patent jerks would do.

That would be terrible. Though, if everything were open source and novel, that's at least half the battle. And when it comes down to it, a patent troll would have to prove that you used his trick in court, and magicians might have the upper hand there.