Derren Brown - the events - predicts lottery results

[persephonesnape]

here

oh happy! it's been far too long since Derren was on TV - and now...twice in one week!

There must have been some other trickery involved in the Russian roulette trick because he didn't fire the 'real' bullet into his head, did he? There's more to that stunt that a fake bullet - if he had actually fired a fake bullet at his head, it would still have been pretty nasty!!!!

I know what is was!!!!

Was there a mirror? So the mirror of the lottery numbers on the tv reflects into the balls, or the balls were mirrored.

Gotta be a mirror in there somehwere.

i kind of don't want to know because i like the whole enchantment and wonder. it's like believing in the tooth fairy.

nooooooooooo! We will never know.

Well, the 'wisdom of crowds' stuff is bollocks for a start - it's about lots of little bits of knowledge/expertise being pooled & tending towards the mean. Can't apply to predicting a random event.

I'm going with the 'heavy balls' theory. Much more feasible.

That was a waste of an hour that I will never get back again.

I am REALLY in a mood. I honestly honestly believed that we would get a big reveal on tonight's programme. Instead I got a load of old misdirectional tosh about subliminal thinking and the power of the minds of a group of people being able to predict the lottery. Oh - and a really pissed off DH who was forced to watch the show so I could satisfy my curiosity.

won't be watching any more

yes, I think the fixed result is more plausible. Definately not the group of people picking the number though.

I was so looking forward to it as well! What a cop out. I feel used and misled. Like someone has just given me a big gift wrapped present and inside was a poo.

The "wisdom of crowds" thing is total bollocks.

People allow themselves to be misled by the fact that the Lottery balls have numbers on, and so think there must be some mathematical pattern to the selection. The numbers are irrelevant. They might as well have pictures of animals, colours or flags of the world.

Imagine Alan Dedicoat:
"And this weeks first ball is... Giraffe! Last picked six week ago, 329 times now as a main ball!... And next we have... Aardvark! 458th time as a main ball... Lottery funding enabled an aardvark sanctuary in Surrey to stay open just last month..." etc.

The only true thing spoken in the "reveal" was all the stuff at the end about how bloody impossible it would be to fix the machine - so the "heavy balls" thing is bollocks too.

It was a conjuring trick with a split screen. If it hadn't been, he would have gone out of his way to show us that it wasn't (by walking in front of the balls, for example).

I think both explanations were misdirection. The simplest answer is usually right. It was a camera trick.

that was all a crock of shit! why on EARTH did he think an hour of telling us a load of crap would be a Good Thing?! He didn't even explore the possibility of camera trickery etc.

And now I'm sitting here in my disappointment watching David Fannybaws Blaine.

A-ha- this is much more plausible (apols for the rag linked )

anyway, the average of a linear numerical thing like weight (the cow example), yes maybe the crowd could predict.
But the lottery numbers arent linear - i.e. what if the average wa 25.5 - would that be 25 or 26? instead they would have had to use the most POPULAR chosen balls.

A load of bollox

Yep - nothing to say that every single person on the show wasn't an actor, and everything a camera trick.

The 'power of thought' and 'fixed result' options obviously bollocks - possible that his own 'row of balls' were bluetoothed or something to project numbers up inside them as the results were read out.

God I hate the self-satisfied little smart arse, I don't ususaly watch him for that reason, wish I hadn't been sucked into watching him tonight either

What a crock of shit.

the wisdom of crowds thing is a red herring -the crowd might have believed they correctly predicted the result but he didn't ever show them the balls did he?

Also if there was no trickery involved then why wasn't his 'prediction' lottery reveal in front of a live audience?

It was a split screen - pure and simple.

I am a Derren fan but I do wish he'd taled a bit more about the various camera trickery theories. Could he really have fixed the lottery?! I don't know!!

I wondered if the bbc somehow co operated with him wrt to timings etc and were in on the trick.because they are going to make a fortune over the next few weeks with people attempting to 'predict' the numbers using various silly methods

Why does he keep saying he PRE-dicted the lottery results? He didn't. He POST-dicted them.

grr wish I'd known it wasn't really going to be revealed.
Think he was alluding to chaos theory with his "deep mathematics" rubbish but although I know very little about it, I'm fairly sure it can't be applied like that. And regression to the mean is stupid too, as others have said it can't be used for random events, and where it is applied, 24 people would be about as useless as 1.

Actually all magic shows on telly are bollocks - far too easy to fix so what's the point?

Penn and Teller the only ones watching imo - at least their 'reveals' genuinely gave an insight into how stuff was done.

yes, I'm disappointed to say I think the split screen is much more likely. Wish he'd sealed that group's notes in a huge envelope and given them to someone for safekeeping.

And I've been telling DH that all the camera trickery / LED balls stuff is "too Paul Daniels" - lol at the Sun article.
I imagined the misdirection would be at us, for example - making us believe the actual lottery numbers were something else.

Noddy - that was my other theory - a collaboration between Derren and the Lottery to drum up trade.

But the split screen / bluetooth balls trickery thing would be so ridiculously easy anyway that's gotta be it really.