Magic 09 – Rehearsal

Date: May 11, 2015

Final Script

(Work In Progress)

Intro evolution of the suits…

The history of cards suits is long and wrought with struggles just like people and our history of battles, mixed cultures and new generations. To understand the history of cards, we first need to think about the history of …but to think about evolution and how intelligence, let alone simple traits, can emerge from pure chaos, we have to think down to the simplest of organisms. To help with that, today we are going to play with our most basic of sensors and actuators, inputs and outputs, and see if we, together can derive some simple yet intelligent behavior.For the first experiment, I am going to need everyones participation. But before you all join me on stage, I realize that it is hard to believe that each of you are simple sets of inputs and outputs, so we will need to take away some of your individuality. If you could all slip on our experiment outfits (tyvek suit and goggles), then we can proceed.

Many of the actions we perform on a daily, if not much more frequent basis, are performed by muscle memory. If you had to think about your heart beating, or lungs breathing, we might be in trouble as a species. However, you could imagine that even these most basic of functions were all we had the power to control at one point.

The best of athletes, dancers, musicians, magicians, or any performer knows their routine as muscle memory. There is not time to think about the details of swinging a bat when you have half a second to decide to swing. In fact, it is often suggested that to throw off an opponent, you can ask them precisely how they do the action they do so well. This is so common that the phrase, “quit thinking” is common on any sport field.

So why are we all up here? Good question. Not simply to look silly… to act silly as well! I mentioned the heart beating, or the lungs breathing, and those would be quite easy tasks to recreate. If I said that all of you are cells in a heart, do your best to make a heart beat, I bet you could do so without coordinating ahead of time…

Let’s try that out: <ask performers to clap when they want to beat, eventually, hopefully quickly, they clap in unison>

Thanks for your applause! But we haven’t even begun yet.

Let’s try another task, raise your hands the moment after the person on your right raises their hands: <see the performers performa a wave>

Wow, this places is getting out of control! Great wave, not sure I deserve it yet, but let’s keep going.

How about this task. Clap in between the person on your left and the person on your right.
<watch performers struggle to create anything coherent>

This shouldn’t be too difficult of a task, I think you are all thinking about it too much.

Here, I brought some other assistants that like to think much less. <brings out circuit boards> So the only thing I told these circuit boards to do was to blink every second, but to also adjust their blink a small amount to be closer to the middle of the circuit on its left and right. Sound familiar?

So will it be chaos?!

The wave?! Is that just coincidence? If the wave would have worked for you to clap in between your neighbors, why didn’t you just do the wave?

…
Thanks volunteers. proceeds with another magic trick that will take advantage of everyones ability to do something in or out of sync.