Behind great magic there often lies some interesting maths or computer science, buried in the secret of how the trick works. To be a good magician you need to know more than just the secret though. Great magicians also have a flair for cognitive psychology: they have a natural understanding of people and how we think. It turns out that computer scientists use the same psychology as the magicians in designing usable computer systems.
The invisible dice mystery – a magic trick underpinned by computing and maths
The Ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks used dice with various shapes and markings; some even believed they could be used to predict the future. Using just a few invisible dice, which you can easily make at home, you can amaze your friends with a transparent feat of magical prediction (read on).
The illusion of good software design
When disasters involving technology occur, human error is often given as the reason, but even experts make mistakes using poor technology. Rather than blame the person, human error should be seen as a design failure. Bad design can make mistakes more likely and good design can often eliminate them. Optical illusions and magic tricks show how we can design things that cause everyone to make the same systematic mistake, and we need to use the same understanding of the brain when designing software and hardware (read on).
Hear and … their magic square
Victorian Computer Scientists, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage were interested in Magic Squares. We know this because a scrap of paper with mathematical doodles and scribbles on it in their handwriting has been discovered, and one of the doodles is a magic square like this one. In a magic square all the rows, columns and diagonals magically add to the same number. At some point, Ada and Charles were playing with magic squares together. Creating magic squares sounds hard, but perhaps not with a bit of algorithmic magic (read on).
More to come (of course)
This blog is funded by EPSRC on grant EP/W033615/1.
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