by Howard Williams, Queen Mary University of London
(From the archive)
Can computers lend a creative hand to the production of new magic tricks? That’s a question our team, led by Peter McOwan at Queen Mary, wrestled with.
The idea that computers can help with creative endeavours like music and drawing is nothing new – turn the radio on and the song you are listening to will have been produced with the help of a computer somewhere along the way, whether it’s a synthesiser sound, or the editing of the arrangement, and some music is created purely inside software. Researchers have been toiling away for years, trying to build computer systems that actually write the music too! Some of the compositions produced in this way are surprisingly good! Inspired by this work, we decided to explore whether computers could create magic.
The project to build creative software to help produce new magic tricks started with a magical jigsaw that could be rearranged in certain ways to make objects on its surface disappear. Pretty cool, but what part did the computer play? A jigsaw is made up of different pieces, each with four sides – the number of different ways all these pieces can be put together is very large; for a human to sit down and try out all the different configurations would take many hours (perhaps thousands, if not millions!). Whizzing through lots of different combinations is something a computer is very good at. When there are simply too many different combinations for even a computer to try out exhaustively, programmers have to take a different approach.
Evolve a jigsaw
A genetic algorithm is a program that mimics the biological process of natural selection. We used one to intelligently search through all the interesting combinations that the jigsaw might be made up from. A population of jigsaws is created, and is then ‘evolved’ via a process that evaluates how good each combination is in each generation, gradually weeding out the combinations that wouldn’t make good jigsaws. At the end of the process you hope to be left with a winner; a jigsaw that matches all the criteria that you are hoping for. In this particular case, we hoped to find a jigsaw that could be built in two different ways, but each with a different number of the same object in the picture, so that you could appear to make an object disappear and reappear again as you made and remade it. The idea is based on a very old trick popularised by Sam Lloyd, but our aim was to create a new version that a human couldn’t, realistically, have come up with, without a lot of free time on their hands!
To understand what role the computer played, we need to explore the Genetic Algorithm mechanism it used to find the best combinations. How did the computer know which combinations were good or bad? This is something creative humans are great at – generating ideas, and discarding the ones they don’t like in favour of ones they do. This creative process gradually leads to new works of art, be they music, painting, or magic tricks. We tackled this problem by first running some experiments with real people to find out what kind of things would make the jigsaw seem more ‘magical’ to a spectator. We also did experiments to find out what would influence a magician performing the trick. This information was then fed into the algorithm that searched for good jigsaw combinations, giving the computer a mechanism for evaluating the jigsaws, similar to the ones a human might use when trying to design a similar trick.
More tricks
We went on to use these computational techniques to create other new tricks, including a card trick, a mind reading trick on a mobile phone, and a trick that relies on images and words to predict a spectator’s thought processes. You can find out more including downloading the jigsaw at www.Qmagicworld.wordpress.com
Is it creative, though?
There is a lot of debate about whether this kind of ‘artificial intelligence’ software, is really creative in the way humans are, or in fact creative in any way at all. After all, how would the computer know what to look out for if the researchers hadn’t configured the algorithms in specific ways? Does a computer even understand the outputs that it creates? The fact is that these systems do produce novel things though – new music, new magic tricks – and sometimes in surprising and pleasing ways, previously not thought of.
Are they creative (and even intelligent)? Or are they just automatons bound by the imaginations of their creators? What do you think?
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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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