cannibalchicken:

so this was actually a card trick that my parents found on a website in the 1990s and were totally fooled by it and then showed it to me to see if I could figure out the trick that took them hours to figure out

it went something like:

several face-up cards are shown on the screen.

a message on the screen asks you to choose one of them (silently, in your head)

then they are “taken away and shuffled,” then “put back,” face down

then, one by one, they are turned over, all except one.

the ones that are revealed are, without fail, all the ones except the one you picked.

whereupon my nonplussed little self, who had only bothered to hold that one card in my memory anyway, said, “so… are these any of the same cards that were there before?”

and of course they weren’t.

Because apparently, you were not supposed to try and keep more than the one card in your memory… but at the same time you were supposed to assume that the other cards would remain the same, and that yours would be obvious via the process of elimination.

The simulation picked a whole different set of cards that were only notable for NOT being any of the ones it had shown before. And then it tried to gaslight me into thinking they WERE those ones.

I think the reason it worked on some people, is that some people did not think about how incredibly easy it is for a computer to do sleight of hand, when it can literally just make you see anything on the screen that it’s programmed to make you see?

maybe this trick would only have ever worked on anyone in the 1990s?