The setup looks simple, but people attracted to the long row
of nine-sided, wooden rings at the
Exploratorium
in San Francisco can't resist trying it—again and again.
Each ring bears the numbers from 1 to 9. You "shuffle" the
rings, rotating them so that you can read a scrambled string of digits along
the top of the row.
Starting at one end, you think of a number from 1 to 9, and
you move along the top row from ring to ring according to the designated number. For example, if your chosen number
is 4, you move over four rings along the row. The number on top of the ring on
which you land gives you the number of steps for your next move, and so on. You
continue in this way as far as you can go down the line and note the number on
the ring where you end up.
Amazingly, when you do it again from the same end and with the
same sequence of numbered rings but with a different starting number, you're
almost sure to end up at the same ring.
Aptly titled "
Sooner or Later,"
the Exploratorium exhibit is an ingenious variant of a card-guessing trick that
magicians can use to show off their mind-reading prowess, even though its
success is rooted in mathematical principle.
The magician invites a subject to shuffle a standard deck of
52 playing cards and secretly pick a number between 1 and 10. The subject
slowly and steadily deals out the cards one by one, face up, to form a pile. As
she does so, she goes through the following counting routine: Suppose her
secret number is 6. The sixth card that she deals becomes a "key"
card, and its face value tells her how many more cards must be dealt to get to
the next key card. For example, if the key card happens to be 7, she starts
counting again, this time from 1 up to 7, to find the next key card. She
repeats the procedure until all 52 cards are dealt. An ace counts as 1, and a
king, queen, or jack count as 5.
At some point, she reaches a key card (perhaps the last card
in the deck) that is not followed by enough cards for her to complete the
count. This final key card becomes the subject's "chosen" card and
the magician's mind-reading target.
No matter how steadily the subject deals out the entire deck
(with no pauses at crucial moments or other hints of which cards are key), the
magician still has a high probability of identifying the mystery card.
The reason is that, for many arrangements of the deck, every
starting point leads to the same final key card. So, all a magician has to do
is to select his own starting point, then count his way to the end while the
subject is dealing the cards. He is very likely to end up at the same
"chosen" card as the subject.
One way to see what is going on is to deal out a shuffled
deck so that the cards form an array. I used colored chips to identify the key
cards associated with each of the 10 possible starting points. Suppose the first
card is a 10. The second chip goes on the 11th card in the array—an ace; the
next chip goes on the adjacent card—a 7, and so on. Using chips of a different
color, I started with the second card—a 5—and laid down a new trail. At some
stage, the second trail happened to hit a card already marked by a chip. From
that point on, the trails coincided.
The same behavior underlies the convergence of paths along
the row of nine-sided rings in the Exploratorium exhibit. For typical "random" arrangements
of the rings, you'll end up at the same ring, no matter what your starting
number.
The trick doesn't work every time. For certain arrangements
of the deck (or rings), one or two starting points may generate trails that
never coincide with the others. In the case of a deck of 52 cards, however, the
probability is about 5/6 that the magician ends up at the same card as the
subject—assuming both magician and subject count accurately and correctly.
A magician can increase his chances of "guessing"
correctly by starting with a card near the beginning of the deck. Giving royal
cards a lower value (say, 2 instead of 5) and using two decks shuffled together
also improve the odds of having trails intersect.
In 2001,
Jeffrey
C. Lagarias,
Eric
Rains, and
Robert J. Vanderbei
took a closer look at the Kruskal count. They used computer simulations and
mathematical arguments to determine the effect of two parameters on the
probability of success for the magician: the freedom to choose the initial key
card and the freedom to assign values to the face cards. The researchers
described their results in a paper titled "
The Kruskal Count."
Lagarias, Rains, and Vanderbei compared three possibilities
for assigning values to face cards. Suppose the values 11, 12, and 13 are
assigned to the jack, queen, and king, respectively. In this case, the
magician's probability of failure is about 0.34. Assigning the value 10 to all
face cards lowers the failure probability to 0.29. Going with the usual rule of
assigning the value 5 to face cards slashes the failure probability to 0.16. If
the magician chooses the first card as his starting point, the failure
probability drops further to 0.14.
"The magician should choose his key card value to be
1," the researchers concluded. "Assuming this strategy for the
magician, the success probability of the original Kruskal count trick is just
over 85 percent."
In general, "the effect of the choice of the magician's
key card on the failure probability is small, at most 2.5 percent," they
noted. "The choice to have face cards take the value 5 rather than 10 has
a much larger effect on the failure probability than the magician's choice of
first key card position."
The underlying mechanics of the Kruskal count also
highlights how seemingly unrelated chains of events can lock together in sync
after a while—a phenomenon worth watching for in other contexts.
It also calls to mind a comment by Sherlock Holmes in the
story "
The Disappearance of
Lady Frances Carfax" by Arthur Conan Doyle: "When you follow two
separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection
which should approximate to the truth."
References:
______. 1956. Mathematics,
Magic and Mystery. Dover.
Photos by I. Peterson
