Puzzling News / Oct 2000


	SCOTT KIM’S PUZZLING NEWS / OCTOBER 2000 Magic

I was fascinated by magic as a kid. I loved reading about Houdini's ingenious escapes, visiting magic shops, reading Genii magazine, and attending the annual It's Magic show. My brother and I put on magic shows for our family. My piano teacher's husband was an amateur magician; I inherited his set of the Tarbell course in magic.
     As I grew older I found I was more interested in understanding the psychology of magic than in performing. Magic takes advantage of the peculiar ways the mind works, and is thus an excellent way to investigate perception. I drifted away from magic and more toward puzzles and optical illusions, where I didn't have to keep the workings of the tricks secret.
     When I got to college I met statistics professor and retired close-up magician Persi Diaconis, who became something of a mentor. Although he is reluctant to perform, he does occasionally weave magic into his mathematical work. To illustrate the mathematics of permutations he can take a deck of cards in its original order out of the box, and do several perfect riffle shuffles in a row (magicians call it a Faro Shuffle), after which the deck returns to its original order. He also published a paper that analyzes how many shuffles it takes to randomize a deck of cards
     Persi encouraged me to write to Martin Gardner, who wrote the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American column. Martin is also an avid magician and has written several classics in the field. Through Martin I started meeting the magicians I had read about as a kid.
     To my delight I found that they shared my other passionate interests. Martin and Persi of course love mathematics. Ray Hyman is a psychology professor at University of Oregon, Eugene. Jerry Andrus also invents dramatically weird optical illusions. Mark Setteducati also designs games. James Randi scrutinizes people who claim to have paranormal abilities. And Jamy Swiss collaborated with information graphics advocate Edward Tufte to write a fascianating chapter about visual presentation of magic for Tufte's book Visual Explanations.
     At a recent gathering in honor of Martin Gardner, Mark Setteducati introduced me to Daniel Rhod, magician and founder of the classy magic magazine Imagik, published in France. His interview with me appears in the current issue of Imagik. Daniel asked me to create some new inversions of the article; you can see them in this month's inversion on my web site. You can read about the Gardner Gathering in Teller 's (of Penn and Teller) report.
     Speaking of Mark Setteducati I recommend you check out his new book The Magic Show, which he co-authored with Anne Benkowitz. It's an astonishingly original popup book which actually performs a series of 10 tricks for you, with you as assistant. Many of the tricks, including the cover, completely fooled me the first time through.

WHAT’S NEW OCTOBER 2000

Inversion of the Month: Robert-Houdin. Invertible tribute to the magician who transformed magic from a circus side show into an elegant stage performance. Also includes inversions on IMAGIK and magician DE KOLTA.

NewMedia Puzzler. October: Convergence (tricky maze: move three things at once). The shortest solution I've found so far has 60 moves: D2 L5 UR U2 R4 D3 L4 U3 R4 ULDLU L3 RDL D4 R5 U2 L U2 D3 R3. Can you find a better solution?

Discover Magazine Boggler. October: This month is Discover's 20th anniversary, so I created puzzles on the theme of 20: 20 Trees (arrange 10 trees to make five rows of four, and variations), 20 Questions (deduce a number by asking divisibility questions), and 20 Painted Houses (paint all the houses in a block without painting two neighboring houses in a row).

FROM READERS

Ambigram aficionado Ronald Dana created a beautifully rendered inversion on the word "Graphics".

Brett Gilbert from Harlow, England created an ambitious ambigram on his own name. Click on "ambigram" under "Start".

ClickMazes. Brett's sister Andrea Gilbert created a wonderful site full of original interactive mazes programmed in Java. Highly recommended.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS
Click here for other issues of my monthly newsletter.

Like my monthly newsletter? Want to receive it by email every month? Just enter your email address below and click "Join". I won't give your address to anyone else, and you can cancel any time.

Join Scott Kim’s Puzzling News!