Derren Brown - More Lotto numbers needed please

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Soup Dragon
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Derren Brown - More Lotto numbers needed please

Post by Soup Dragon »

Some of you might have seen my Facebook posts regarding Derren Brown's trick when he managed to correctly predict the six lotto numbers on Wednesday 9th September. Basically he had 24 members of the public pick 6 random numbers and he took the average score from these picks to get the final 6 numbers. One of my friends was amongst the 24 people that helped Derren pick the numbers and he claims that the trick was genuine.

I'm doing an experiment to see if this theory could possibly work, all I need is six random numbers between -99 and +99 in any order.... e.g. 7 -12 62 4 -37 28

If you haven't already sent me numbers on facebook please PM me your random picks :-)

I'll report back on Saturday evening how many we got right!
Last edited by Soup Dragon on 23 Sep 2009, 06:38, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by tubeguru »

It was genuine up to four balls, but you will notice that DB did not show the people who helped him what the final six balls chosen were.

I bet you don't even win a tenner.
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Soup Dragon
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Soup Dragon »

I bet we don't even get one number!
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ping pon
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by ping pon »

I bet you the amount you win that you get 3 or more numbers !
One has lost the game !!!!!
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Going Underground »

PM sent, snowballs and hell spring to mind :roll:
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by jbom1 »

Combining guesses is a useful way of estimating all sorts of things, particularly when the guesses are roughly equally likely to be underestimates or overestimates. If I want to know how long it would take to visit all the London Underground stations, I could ask a reasonably large panel of slightly knowledgeable people. Some might say a couple of hours (particularly if they're answering Andi's call, as per the video), some might say a week. I'd expect that there would be roughly as many over- and underestimates, so the middle answer (median) might well be a decent guess.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to work for lottery numbers. There are about 13 million equally unlikely answers. No amount of guesses is going to give me any more relevant or useful information about which one will come up than I had before. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to expect the "right" answer to fall in any sense in the middle of a distribution of random guesses. Also, even where it is relevant, this kind of method might give the right order of magnitude for many problems, but is obviously not precise to one part in several million.

So, what he did was a trick or deception of some kind (I exclude the one in 13 million lucky guess).
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Starkey7 »

tubeguru wrote:It was genuine up to four balls, but you will notice that DB did not show the people who helped him what the final six balls chosen were.
But they could have found that out from the news, anyway.
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Edgemaster »

Starkey7 wrote:
tubeguru wrote:It was genuine up to four balls, but you will notice that DB did not show the people who helped him what the final six balls chosen were.
But they could have found that out from the news, anyway.
He didn't show them the balls they chose themselves.

He calculated the average in front of them, and put 6 white ping pong balls into a brown tube without them seeing the numbers on the front. (So they couldn't go and buy a ticket, under the pretence that adding their greed to the system causes it to fail)
The next time they see their balls is in Derren's live appearance where he confirms the result. Of course, this part can be faked by trickery.
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Soup Dragon »

Starkey7 wrote:
tubeguru wrote:It was genuine up to four balls, but you will notice that DB did not show the people who helped him what the final six balls chosen were.
But they could have found that out from the news, anyway.
I know one of the 24 people that helped picked the numbers and he reckons that it was all genuine. Each time they picked the numbers a couple of hours before the draw and as a team they got progressively better at gettings the numbers correct. with the sequence 1/6, 3/6, 4/6 and evntually (if you believe it) 6/6 correct balls. On all the other attemps it was a member of the group of 24 that calculated the average for each ball, but for the main show DB calculated this. My friend also said that the whole team was sworn to secracy, he couldn't even tell his wife what the show was about.
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Soup Dragon »

I now have the enough random numbers and have calculated the winning numbers for Saturday. I'll post the numbers shortly before the draw. :)
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by dudey »

Soup Dragon wrote:I now have the enough random numbers and have calculated the winning numbers for Saturday. I'll post the numbers shortly before the draw. :)
As long as it's before! ;)
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Edgemaster »

Did anyone get stuck to their seat in his show this evening?

Again, there's more to it than he makes out, it can't the video alone is not what does it, I'm guessing his build-up to it was hypnosis.

That is, assuming the people in the theatre and the ones that phoned in were genuine...
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by mullardo »

I felt stuck a little. But I think that was me wanting it to work more than it actually working.
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by Soup Dragon »

My daughter had two friends over for a sleepover last night and we all watched Darren Brown, first time nothing happened and we all managed to stand up out of our chairs. We then watched the programme an hour later on plus one and both Phil (ping pon) and my daughters friend Jo couldn't get out of their chairs. Phil managed to get out after a couple of minutes but Jo was in tears and very scared, she struggled to stand up even after they played the clearing music. For myself I did feel very relaxed and had to make a couple of attempts to stand up the second time around, but maybe that was due to the couple of glasses of wine that I'd drunk. At least three times during this trick they flashed up an image of a person bound in a chair by ropes, did everyone else see that or did they see it more than three times?
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Re: Derren Brown - Lotto Numbers

Post by jamesthegill »

I saw it, I also noticed in the build up to the video his speech had a lot of suggestive words in it too. It only affected a select group of people i.e. not those with the cynicism gene.

Good entertainment though.
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