Derren Brown Cheating Too! :(

[Stefan]

I would have difficulty flipping pages in a physical dictionary for 20 minutes, and sustaining a "1 page per second" rate also seems hard.

I don't know about that particular book, but I just tried one I have and got through 400 pages in 2.5 minutes. And I had no practice.

Worth a shufti

Nice, didn't know about that book. I should first finally finish reading his "Tricks of the Mind", though...

 

[Mike Hughey]

Maybe I'm just doubtful because my parents had an Oxford English Dictionary at home when I was growing up. It was a miniaturized version (small print - came with a magnifying glass), in two volumes. I remember the pages being impossibly thin, so you had to be quite careful to turn the pages to keep from ripping them. And there were so many pages! Here's what my parents had: http://www.amazon.com/Compact-Editi...060&sr=8-6&keywords=oxford+english+dictionary

I looked up on Amazon what I presume to be the one Darren used: http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Americ...060&sr=8-1&keywords=oxford+english+dictionary
2096 pages. That means over 1000 pages to turn. That would in fact be almost a page turn per second. If you had to be careful (to not rip the pages), and you had to open it fully (so you could "photograph" the page), and you had to get a clear enough view to not miss any words, I would think this would be pretty difficult. But I suppose after looking at the numbers, it is theoretically possible. I guess I was fooled because I'm quite sure I never could have pulled it off on my parents' old copy.

 

[Mike Hughey]

You actually "mentally photograph" the page at 25,000 words a minute."

Makes you wonder why we don't do 3-5 BLD just like speedsolving: 15 second inspection time, pull the blindfold on, then start the timer. All you need is 6 mental photographs - why would that take more than 15 seconds?

 

[Ollie]

I don't know about that particular book, but I just tried one I have and got through 400 pages in 2.5 minutes. And I had no practice.



Nice, didn't know about that book. I should first finally finish reading his "Tricks of the Mind", though...

Tricks of the Mind is amazing. In fact it has something in it about 'photoreading' (basically an anecdote where he went to a class that apparently taught it and that it was utter pollocks.) But I learnt quite a lot of my BLD memo stuff from the section on memory, currently reading the bits about NLP at the moment

There is a lot of stuff in his acts that he actually goes away and practices meticulously, but there's also stuff that is mostly showmanship. If there is a video of the trick it'll be pretty damn interesting to try and suss out.

 

[qqwref]

At least if someone says "ah, but I saw Derren Brown do 4BLD in a minute" you can respond "sure, but he's a magician, and I'm doing it without any tricks". I think Maxim's gimmicks and cheats would be harder to explain away, since you'd have to convince the other person that he really was using tricks, and that you aren't just jealous or something.

Derren Brown certainly does do some interesting stuff, though. I'd be interested to learn how much is clever trickery and how much actually could be applied to real scenarios (even if the second part is only a few %).

 

[Stefan]

Makes you wonder why we don't do 3-5 BLD just like speedsolving: 15 second inspection time, pull the blindfold on, then start the timer. All you need is 6 mental photographs - why would that take more than 15 seconds?

25,000 words a minute btw isn't even the most excessive claim I've seen. I hope this link works. It reports about someone who could alledgedly read 416,250 words per minute, and it's in a speed reading book of Tony Buzan, who unfortunately is fairly famous and respected, and he says it's also mentioned in a book of Dominic O'Brien, an eight time world memory champion.

 

[Mike Hughey]

It reports about someone who could alledgedly read 416,250 words per minute, and it's in a speed reading book of Tony Buzan, who unfortunately is fairly famous and respected, and he claims it's also mentioned in a book of Dominic O'Brien, an eight time world memory champion.

Silly - all you need to do is fit 416,250 words on a single page, and you should be able to read them in a single second, right?

My father claims he thinks he had photographic memory when he was young, before he got shocked during a thunderstorm in his teens. He says he always assumed photographic memory worked like you're describing - where you could look at a page and instantly recall a mental image of it. But what he could do wasn't like that - he would have to look at a page for a while (many seconds - even a minute), but when he was done, he could recall where things were on the page (and find a word on it, for instance, and tell you where it was) by looking at it in his mind. Of course, there's no way to test this, so I don't know if he could really do it, but it's what he claimed.

 

[ben1996123]

I saw one of his live shows not too long ago and he did 3x3 match the scramble BLD there with like 5 seconds of "memo" and 20 seconds of solving. after the show finished, I asked him how long it takes him to solve a cube sighted and he said about 1 minute using the beginners method. L.O.L. !

 

[Stefan]

Here's someone else doing a similar trick:
http://vimeo.com/5623552
It's very easy to see how he did it, he didn't even bother trying to hide it.

 

[KongShou]

I saw one of his live shows not too long ago and he did 3x3 match the scramble BLD there with like 5 seconds of "memo" and 20 seconds of solving. after the show finished, I asked him how long it takes him to solve a cube sighted and he said about 1 minute using the beginners method. L.O.L. !

U talked to him? I would like to meet him, his awesome!

 

[Eric Limeback]

I mean, if the TV show want you to do a BLD solve, theres a likelihood that you'll set it up so that people can see you get the success, which is all they care about. Saying "O I failed but it was close" doesn't cut it for the media.

I can attest to this....a couple years ago I did a blindsolve on a TV news station...DNF'd by a flipped edge during the commercial break but they told me to fix it and just go with it for TVs sake...felt real bad

 

[illucid]

It also depends on how the act works, if he is allowed some time to look at the cube beforehand, that could possibly be long enough for the scramble to be generated, and then if he knew at least some form of notation, it could then be read out in less than a minute once he has placed on the blindfold.

I suppose we'd get more of a chance of figuring it out if there is a video somewhere, but I doubt that one exists.

He could be using a specially prepared cube with sensors in the core to detect turns and broadcast them offstage (I'm sure the technology exists to do this if it hasn't already been done). Or they just image process the cube as it's placed on a table with a computer turning out the solution. Then the moves could be read back to him through a hidden speaker.

 

[qqwref]

Here's someone else doing a similar trick:
http://vimeo.com/5623552
It's very easy to see how he did it, he didn't even bother trying to hide it.

You know, I think it would be cool to have something in our community where we keep track of magic tricks involving the cube - not to promote the people who do them, but to explain how they're done and create a clearer distinction between magic tricks and real cubing skill. Perhaps people could do a writeup on the wiki. For example in that video I see three techniques we can easily explain:
- having a cube with one side covered in wrong stickers, so that it can look "scrambled" and then be thrown in the air and caught with that side down to appear solved
- having the competitor scramble a cube, but then replacing it with one the magician knows the solution to
- putting a cube down on top of stickers, so that one side can be restickered in a known way, which can then be used to make a multi-cube design or something.

EDIT: And I shouldn't forget wearing a blindfold and then looking under it to solve a cube with a normal method. I saw a magician do this once.

 

[AvGalen]

He could be using a specially prepared cube with sensors in the core to detect turns and broadcast them offstage (I'm sure the technology exists to do this if it hasn't already been done). Or they just image process the cube as it's placed on a table with a computer turning out the solution. Then the moves could be read back to him through a hidden speaker.

You are overthinking it. Just look at the explanation of qqwref for the video that Stefan posted

Here's someone else doing a similar trick:
http://vimeo.com/5623552
It's very easy to see how he did it, he didn't even bother trying to hide it.

Excellent performance. Really high speed so people don't get time to think, but making it look slow so people can follow what is happening nicely. Such simple tricks with nice effects will trick most people

 

[cmhardw]

You know, I think it would be cool to have something in our community where we keep track of magic tricks involving the cube - not to promote the people who do them, but to explain how they're done and create a clearer distinction between magic tricks and real cubing skill.

I used the trick detailed here by Jaap on a group of kids at the math learning center I used to work at. They had already seen me do a real blindsolve beforehand, though, so I guess there was a little less "magic" to it as they probably knew I was using some kind of trick since it was so different from how I normally did BLD solves.

This one uses the math of the cube for a really cool simulated BLD solve.

 

[Stefan]

Ah well, now that qq explained everything already, let me just add what I meant with him not trying to hide it. At 0:42 you see the board with the cubes close-up, and all four cubes in the back row, which he'll then use for his first two tricks, are identical.

Here's another video of him doing it, also using the same scramble (around 1:32).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsHDRMvMTU

 

[BillyRain]

Maybe our definition of flipping is different, but to flip a page so far that I could read the next left and right page it seems impossible for me to do that for 20 minutes with 1 flip per second (not even close actually)

I had to laugh at "rubber thimble thing". I could guess what it means but just to be sure I used an image search (that gave some relevant images), but wikipedia disagreed with what a thimble actually is and actually said it would protect you from papercuts

LMAO!

 

[mcplums]

Derren Brown's rubik's cube trick in his Infamous tour

Hello chaps,

I just came back from Derren's Infamous live tour, and at the end he does a truly incredibly rubiks cube trick. I am wondering if anyone else has seen it? What are your opinions on whether he faked it?

What he did was:

1) received two scrambled 3x3 cubes from the audience
2) looked at them for max five seconds each
3) took one of his choice, and then behind his back, arranged it such that it was identically scrambled to the other cube, which he did in about 30 secs.

Im new to speedcubing, but it seems to be that pulling this off is overwhelmingly difficult. What technique is there which allows you to scramble a solved cube to a specific state of scramble? Is that possible?

 

[Mikel]

Just from reading "Derren's Infamous live tour" and that he used a trick with a Rubik's Cube leads me to believe it was fake. Also, to be able to memorize two cubes in a maximum of 5 seconds each is faster than any good blindfold solver memorizes.

 

[mcplums]

Just from reading "Derren's Infamous live tour" and that he used a trick with a Rubik's Cube leads me to believe it was fake. Also, to be able to memorize two cubes in a maximum of 5 seconds each is faster than any good blindfold solver memorizes.

Agreed. I think it is fairly obviously fake. The memorisation and solve would both appear to be world record breaking times.

Also, I recall that the solve was behind his back while he was facing the audience, so we couldnt even see the cube. Why not, if he was truly solving it?