Posted by Last night the illusionist Derren Brown suggested he had simply worked out the correct numbers by asking a group of 24 people to guess them.
On ‘How To Win the Lottery’ aired on Channel 4, he said he took the team and told them to free their minds of any thoughts of winning and then asked them to write down numbers for each of the six balls.
He took inspiration from the Wisdom of Crowds theory, which essentially says that decisions made by lots of people are better than those by individuals.
The theory tells how a crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.
But last night maths experts poured scorn on Brown’s explanation saying that the whole thing was ‘bluff’ and an hour of ‘nonsense’.
Professor of Pure Mathematics at University of Oxford Roger Heath-Brown told The Mail: ‘This is not a good strategy for picking the lottery. But I can understand why some people might think it is a plausible strategy.
‘Mathematically it is complete rubbish. It is a bluff on his part. He is doing it some other way that is clear. But he is trying to produce what looks like a plausible rationale for producing numbers.’
The academic said it was wrong to draw a comparison with the ox experiment as people in that case had some evidence to go on.
David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk at University of Cambridge said: ‘There is a difference between guessing between the weight of a cake compared with guessing lottery balls, which is unguessable.
‘That is just a clear wind-up and complete nonsense. There is absolutely no way he did that – he can’t get away with that as a serious explanation.’
Dr Darrell Rowbottom, who works in the faculty of philosophy at University of Oxford, added: ‘The probability of success doesn’t change. So we have to conclude that the averaging is irrelevant.’
He added: ‘I guess the easiest way to pull off a trick like this would be to make it look as if you predicted the numbers when you didn’t.’
On last night’s show Brown claimed he had become fascinated by the theory, did he leave you fascinated?, we say
how long before Derren’s ratings for the show hit a predictable LOW. Celebs
Here is another online News article……
Illusionist Derren Brown faced a viewer backlash last night as he raised more questions than answers following his explanation over how he accurately predicted Wednesday’s lottery result live.
During last night’s hour-long How To Win the Lottery broadcast, Brown who always says he gets his results using a combination of “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” took the chance to show other illusions inferring they had a bearing on the lottery trick.
But in the end all Brown revealed was that Wednesday’s illusion was just that – a trick – leaving viewers who felt shortchanged to complain bitterly on message boards.
“He insults our intelligence with this nonsense,” was one response.
“So what was the point of the hour of TV? To mock his audience?” was another. It added further fuel to the theory that Brown’s feat was the result of mere camera trick – with split screen technology one of the most likely explanations put forward.
On the show he said he was partly inspired by a traditional “country fair” technique to accurately predict the result and suggested he had simply worked out the correct numbers by asking a group of 24 people to guess them.
He said he told the group to free their thoughts of winning and asked them to write down numbers for each of the six balls. He then added up all the numbers of the balls and divided the figures by 24 – taking his inspiration from the Wisdom of Crowds Theory which argues that decisions made by many are better than those by individuals.
But some believe this, as well as the show, was just more Brown misdirection.
Fans angered by lottery stunt that was ‘just a trick’
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