Artificial Intelligence vs Magicians and Mentalists

Regina Burton wrote up a nice interview with me on the IBM Community website about the use of Artificial Intelligence in Magic Tricks.  The premise of the article was about how A.I. can be used by magicians to assist them with mind reading and mentalism effects. Using machine learning to accurately predict peoples choices before they have made them. This is a topic that I find fascinating because the results are surprisingly accurate especially when people make their choice without too much thought.  

Peoples choices are far more limited then they like think or how they feel, geography, demographics, past experiences and peer group pressure plays a huge part in decision making so magician can exploit these areas.  If we take that exploitation and combine it with computer algorithms you can create result that is surprisingly accurate. 

The last part of the article we discussed whether AI is making a magicians or mentalists job redundant to which my response was, ‘not yet’.  So far A.I. is not up to a standard where it can adequately present, entertain and hold an audience but it can’t create some pretty impressive tricks! The tricks A.I. can produce could also lessen the impact of a professional mentalist or magician because if prediction becomes so common place then the reactions an entertainer would get for achieving a similar outcome is reduced regardless if they are using A.I. in their performance or not!