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The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges
- joisig 4y agoVery cool project! I’m curious how the magician would typically use this, would the scanner and an output monitor be hidden somewhere on stage or similar?
- jwhitlark 4y agoI would think it would mostly be for practice and rehearsal, to see if you've gone wrong before you reach the end of the trick.
- wongarsu 4y agoI could see someone using this on stage in Penn & Teller's Fool Us. The camera hidden in the table, on the table an elaborate box that never comes into contact with the cards, is used as some elaborate red herring (maybe you have to knock on it, or draw something from it), but really serves to hide a small screen. Now you only have to come up with some impressive card trick that seems impossible to pull off with conventional methods. Of course you could also come up with a better method to communicate the information than an ipad screen. Maybe a tactile signal.
- Brusco_RF 4y agoThe impressive card trick could would be the greatest of all time: Have an audience member shuffle the deck to their hearts content, then place it on a table. Tell them what the top card is, then ask them to flip it to verify. Then proceed to do the same to _the entire deck_
- suyash 4y agothat would be a trade secret and as a magician I won't disclose in the open forum.
- Youden 4y agoNot a magician, just watch tricks occasionally and enjoy thinking about how they're made. I wouldn't necessarily expect the monitor to be visual as card tricks usually just need knowledge of a couple of cards. This could be communicated through sound (e.g. discrete earpiece or bone conduction headphones) or even haptics (e.g. Morse code vibrations from a phone in a pocket). As for the scanner, it'll depend on the trick, the goal is just to hide a camera. It could be concealed in a prop or an item of clothing. The scanning could even be incorporated into the trick, for example by sealing the cards immediately in a "safe".
- goosedragons 4y agoIt's like a modern day Nintendo eReader for magicians! Neat.
- suyash 4y agoNice to see this open sourced as devices like this have existed underground since it can be used for card cheating/stacking as well.
- omoikane 4y agoI was thinking the same thing, I think there is a greater potential for these cards to be used for cheating rather than for magic. Related, is there a way for casino operators to assure their guests that the cards are not marked? I am thinking something similar in spirit to the transparent dice that show they are not loaded, but cards would require something different.
- klaudioz 4y agoSheldon Cooper's magic trick
- arjvik 4y agoDefinitively cooler, though much less funny, than Leonard's psychological trick!
- christiangenco 4y agoThis is amazing! This tech unlocks some impossible card effects (ex: "shuffle the deck, pick your favorite card from it, hand the deck back to me, your card is the Ace of Diamonds"). While reading through this repo I was reminded of a project I'd heard Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox Software (creators of the Borderlands franchise) talk about wanting to make after one of the magic shows he hosted at his house in Frisco, Texas. Randy is a huge fan of magic. He's the great nephew of Cardini and notably recently purchased the Magic Castle[1]. Lo and behold, the primary contributor to this project—Paul Nettle—is an employee at Gearbox Software[2]. What a small world! I'm so happy they've made this open source. 1. https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/the-former-magician-who-now-owns-magic-castle-has-big-plans-for-the-place/ https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/the-former-magician-who-n... 2. https://github.com/nettlep https://github.com/nettlep
- crehn 4y ago> impossible card effects (ex: "shuffle the deck, pick your favorite card from it, hand the deck back to me, your card is the Ace of Diamonds") There is one deceivingly simple trick that is essentially just that.
- bombcar 4y agoThere's more than one that I can think of, and the best I've ever done is the "imaginary deck" one. Setup: shuffle an imaginary deck, fan the imaginary deck, tell someone to pick an imaginary card and remember it, shuffle it back into the imaginary deck and put the deck in your pocket. Remove a deck from your pocket, ask what the card was, fan the deck out, and - it's the only upside down card in the deck!?
- bena 4y agoThis is one where if you have the time and effort to dedicate to it, can be simple. You memorize your deck, so when they tell you the card, you thumb to it and flip it so when you fan it, the card they picked is upside down.
- shagie 4y agoThe tangent to this is done with invisible ink. https://www.markedcardsshop.com/collections/poker-analyzer https://www.markedcardsshop.com/collections/poker-analyzer There is a corresponding custom phone that has a hidden camera on the side (facing the deck) that then communicates with some haptic feedback that the cheater is wearing.
- raphman 4y agoHere's an article from 2017 talking about this class of devices: https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-end-poker-cheating-devices/ https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-en...
- dwighttk 4y agoPersonally if I found out a magician was using this it would completely destroy my appreciation of the magic.
- MivLives 4y agoIf you found out a magician was using this they aren't a very good magician.
- gumby 4y agoIf I encountered a magician who could read a barcode like this in their head I'd really be amazed!
- bombcar 4y agoMarked cards and other such systems have been common for decades, if not centuries; this is a variation on it. Many tricks are more than slight-of-hand, they often are "technical" and involve special decks that are modified in certain ways; you can even buy equipment to reseal decks and rewrap them in plastic so they appear brand-new.
- delecti 4y agoIt's it pretty common that learning the secret of any trick has a chance to destroy the appreciation of the execution?
- dwighttk 4y agoEh. I’ve learned a few card tricks and the mechanic often makes me appreciate the trick more… differently, but more. This would fall into “cheating” for me.
- Hamcha 4y agoTo me the really fascinating magic tricks are the ones that use the basics like sleight of hands and misdirection to build a proper story and presentation, this is just blatant cheating, it's fascinating to know how it's done but it probably won't be part of your favorite magician's routine. And about those tricks, I recently played the demo of a game called "Card Shark" and it does a really nice job of incorporating the more cheating-style tricks into a compelling narrative.
- gostsamo 4y agoThis tech could be a game changer for accessibility. Many card games are not or cannot be adapted to braille, so I haven't been able to play them with friends. If cards can be sold with invisible ink in an open format, then I would need only a scanner and a earphone to be able to check my cards without other help. I've thought of doing with with QR codes, but I'm not sure if it will look okay for the other players and if the qr codes won't be recognizable enough by a human to give someone unfair advantage in some situations.
- pmyteh 4y agoDuplicate bridge cards are often printed with barcodes on the card faces, to facilitate automated dealing machines with computerised hand records. I've never seen a system which reads the barcodes for a blind player, but I'm sure it's possible. (The traditional approach is with a human 'card turner' assisting, which sucks for all kinds of reasons). Or even just reading the standard face images: it's a much easier problem than reading codes on the edges, and has the advantage of not making it easier to cheat!
- gostsamo 4y agoNormal cards are a solved issue. You can print two braille symbols on each and it is done. Imagine though something like cards against humanity for example, where the text on the card would take ten times the space in braille. In different games images and details could have different meaning and simple ocr would be the wrong solution.
- pmyteh 4y agoThat makes sense! If the QR codes or whatever are on the faces and only encode information already printed there (suit+rank for standard cards, the title and text for board games) I can't imagine there would be any cheating/unauthorised information problems.
- gostsamo 4y agoYep, this is the main idea at the moment. Currently looking for a game that needs the solution and is interesting for my social circle.
- mrandish 4y agoThis is a stellar example of a quite rare class of magic trick where the method is actually more amazing than the effect. The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. This is one reason magicians don't reveal "secrets". The reality is most magical methods are rather disappointing compared to the astonishing impact of the effect created. For any magical effect there are almost always many possible methods and, conversely, for each method there are multiple possible effects. This method provides a way to know the location (or absence) of each card in a shuffled deck without the performer handling the deck. For most of the effects which could be accomplished with this method there exist a wide variety of alternate, much simpler, methods. Using any of those easier and cheaper methods would likely appear identically amazing to audiences. And that's why I love this method. As a technologist and magician, I've always had a special fondness for wildly complex methods - that rare kind of magic where the method actually IS as amazing as the effect.
- yupper32 4y ago> The vast majority of magic tricks are the opposite. The effect is amazing but the method is actually quite mundane. You're probably right about it being the majority, but I'd say a lot of good slight of hand also falls into the category of the method being amazing. Penn and Teller are also famous for doing tricks with the secret in full view, and they're often more impressive than the trick done normally.
- Jasper_ 4y agoThe routines in that case are designed to be entertaining, they don't give away secrets that aren't theirs to begin with, and there's often a double bluff where they purport to give away secrets, but there's still an element they don't disclose, or the supposed secret is just misdirection (e.g. the phone inside fish trick) A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. They don't reveal those tricks.
- tshaddox 4y ago> A lot of P&T tricks are boring once the secret is revealed. This is the mindset I don't understand. Unless the secret is something the spectator might reasonably consider "cheating" (like, if it turns out that a video production that's ostensibly of a live performance actually used post-production visual effects), I don't see in what sense knowing the secret ruins the trick. Perhaps for some people it might, but as long as the "secret revelation" content is separate from the "trick performance" content, I trust people to identify for themselves which content they want to watch.
- ImJasonH 4y ago"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
- bergenty 4y agoCan we have the barcode printed in invisible ink that’s only visible to the raspberry pi?
- ImJasonH 4y agoIt's almost like you didn't read the article. https://nettlep.github.io/magic/#marking/irabsorbinginks/usewithstamping https://nettlep.github.io/magic/#marking/irabsorbinginks/use...
- paulmd 4y agoWoah woah woah, you can't just say that! this is HN, we have rules about pointing out when people obviously didn't read the article, it makes them feel bad!
- blamazon 4y agoThat's not a rule, it's a guideline. Rules don't start with "please": > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
- bergenty 4y agoI did actually. Must have missed that part.
- gumby 4y agowhy can't you use just a diagonal line? That's what we used to do when I was a kid (to see if a deck was shuffled or sorted)
- wildzzz 4y agoThat would work well if the camera had sufficient resolution and the cards were stacked nicely. It looks like this can still read the cards when they are stacked unevenly since each card has a unique marking and a common marking to compare against. There are more bits than necessary in the barcode so it can contain error correction in the code. Trying to decode 1 of 54 possible spots for the mark to be in is going to be harder than seeing which of 13 possible spots are marked with the added benefit of only needing to get at least 10 to 12 of them right.
- Donckele 4y agoYeah I’ve tried that method but with the camera resolution I had it was practically impossible to decode.
- davidhay 4y agoVery cool, feel as though a form of this would be in an Ocean's 11 type heist.
- punnerud 4y agoWow, what a next level magic trick enabler. Just me that get the feeling that I am reading a documentation that could be under NDA in a billion dollar magic trick company? https://nettlep.github.io/magic/ https://nettlep.github.io/magic/
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- gavinray 4y agoI read things like this, and I am reminded of how mediocre my own intelligence and skill as a developer is. Still, compared to other possibilities, you take what you can get.
- paulmd 4y agoBarcodes are an underapprecated technology for amateur projects in general. The technology is error-resistant, mature and reliable in a hardware sense, cheap at the entry level and cheap to deploy at scale, etc. I got a surplus commercial Zebra/Symbol 2D/3D barcode scanner gun with dock (or it also talks bluetooth, USB, or naturally RS232) for $35 and a new OEM battery was $15, and tbh you could just have used a smartphone with an app instead if I didn't want the speed and reliability of the scanner gun. Barcodes are the cost of a sheet of printer paper and some tape (or sticker paper if you want to be fancy!) and are an extremely accessible and tactile way to operate all kinds of systems (a barcode doesn't have to be a "thing", it can represent an "action" too) via a control server, same as via an app. Pressing a button in an app is way slower and more cumbersome than scanning a barcode on the wall that says "advance belt to next item", a scanner gun is an enormously fast and tactile UX, and RS-232 and other low-level interfaces make it easy to tie into other stuff. It's a fantastic project tool that is really underexploited compared to "everything is ESP32 on the network". The bar-code and shipping container are probably some of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, and unlike a shipping container it's completely appropriate and accessible to individuals for messing around with projects. (no, your shipping container home is not actually a good idea)
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- RoddaWallPro 4y agoI've wanted to build something pretty distantly adjacent to this for real-world spaced repetition cards. Have a deck of 3x5 cards, with qr codes at one corner. Dump the deck into your scanner (like a money counter) and it splits the deck, giving you a pile of the cards you should review today. Then you switch the scanner into "trying to remember" mode, and you put the cards you successfully recalled into one slot, and the ones you failed into another. The scanner reads their QR codes, notes that you succeeded/failed, so it can updated spacing windows for the next run.
- rfd4sgmk8u 4y agoThis looks like an open source implementation of "Cheating at poker James Bond Style - Defcon 24 (2016)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRgCvCTG_XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRgCvCTG_XQ Very neat. In the video, the illicit cheating device was hidden in a phone. It is theorized that these magic trick could be used in private poker houses to cheat players.
- nonplus 4y agoThis is what I thought of as well.
- doerig 4y agoSuper cool project and amazing documentation! It's well worth a read.
- angst_ridden 4y agoA magician I know talks about the three kinds of magic: sleight of hand, mechanical, and mathematical. The first requires a lot of skill and practice (e.g., palming coins, manipulating cards). The second requires a lot of preparation and engineering (e.g., sawing a person in half, floating person illusions). The third relies on the nature of reality (e.g., dividing sets of cards in a known pattern that forces a result, or manipulating numbers that force an unexpected result). So this is a cool example of the second type. All three types require some showmanship, and good patter. Some of the best tricks combine the types.
- bombcar 4y agoMathematical are often the "easiest" to learn, though they can be the hardest to "sell" when performing, because you have to play ups the magic and downplay the math (often forcing the "numbers" used is a great way to mask it. Mechanical involves some training and skill to exercise well. But above all I put the sleight of hand as the hardest to execute but the best when done well, especially added as flourish on top of the others.
- sharmin123 4y ago
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- AlbertCory 4y agoSomeone mentioned Penn & Teller's "Fool Us" show. You won't learn any trade secrets, but you'll sure discover that they know them. A magician does a trick, then they come up and whisper to him what they think he or she did. You don't get to listen in on that. If they can't figure out the trick, then the magician gets to be the opening act for them at some show. Occasionally someone does fool them. Not often, though.
- lisper 4y agoAmateur magician here. On more than one occasion I've felt that P&T have thrown the game and pretended to be fooled when the method was obvious to me, and therefore almost certainly obvious to them. This is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufpoQmsvJEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufpoQmsvJEg
- AlbertCory 4y agoGood to know. Las Vegas: Why do you think they call it "Lost Wages"?
- kazinator 4y agoBecause the expected return on a dollar is less than a dollar, but the variance is high. Nothing to do with any magician's sleight-of-hand.
- AlbertCory 4y agoTrue about gambling in general, but OP's comment was that the "game" itself was dishonest, according to its own rules.
- firebones 4y agoSo in that one, with the hand motions and the emphasis on "thread" and "well lit" and the motion across (where the Christmas lights connected the two lamps) they were implying that a thread was hanging from the Christmas lights. But since he said he "tried that" and he had to come up with something else, I assume it's some sort of front facing edifice that allowed him to circle the whole thing with a pencil (at about 85% depth) to sell it. Maybe he technically fooled them since the Christmas lights had nothing to do with it and it was something between the two lamp arms themselves.
- stevage 4y agoAnyone else notice the barcode encodes 14 bits but you really only need 6?
- ComputerGuru 4y agoError correction and redundancy to make it work with weird lighting, obscured line-of-sight to portions of a card, shadow from the card on top obscuring part of the edge of the card under it, and general error correction to handle reading such a thin strip with a pretty poor camera?
- neh_89 4y agoThere is no silver bullet when it comes to protecting against ransomware. A ransomware attack A prime example of this was the WannaCry virus attack in May 2017, where 200,000+ computers worldwide were infected due to a weakness in Windows SMB EnternalBlue, which allowed hackers to hijack computers running on an unpatched Microsoft Windows operating system. Users were asked to pay anywhere from 300-700 bitcoins to decrypt the data in 3 days. https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/cyber-risk-management/articles/ransomware-payment-to-pay-not-to-pay/ https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/cyber-risk-management...
- livinglist 4y ago“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
- ale42 4y agoIn the article, I didn't see any information about what ink (and what printer type) can be used for this... any clue where such IR-visible inks can be found? EDIT: Actually, found it in the full "manual"! https://nettlep.github.io/magic/ https://nettlep.github.io/magic/ -- it's not a printer but rather a stamp... :-)
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- Donckele 4y agoCan someone explain the “stamp” method for printing the code on the cards? The stamp images shown on the website seems to be stretched and I can’t figure out whats going on.
- schwartzworld 4y ago> most magical methods are rather disappointing compared to the astonishing impact of the effect created. I have taught a lot of people to do a simple French drop as an intro to magic. People are often a little disappointed at the realization that making a coin "disappear" is really just hiding it in your other hand.