Is This Really How it was Done? – September 18th, 2009

Controversy and doubt are swirling around Brit illusionist Derren Brown’s explanation of how he managed to correctly predict the winning numbers in Wednesday night’s draw of the UK National Lottery (see previous InfoPowa report).

But if publicity was his main aim in ‘revealing’ his secret Friday, it’s worked well – hardly a newspaper in the UK has not reported on it. And a television audience of 2.7 million watched him pull the sleight of hand off. Brown left viewers with more questions than answers after he revealed how he apparently managed to beat odds of 14 million to one in guessing the winning numbers 2, 11, 23, 28, 35, 39 prior to the draw and without resorting to television trickery.

But when it came to detailing how he had done it, observers seemed to feel that there was more showmanship than detail, leaving viewers confused about how he achieved the right prediction. On the one hand, he implied that a combination of “deep maths” and averaging out the subconscious predictions of 24 people was the technique he used – apparently an old “country fair” trick.

But then Brown concluded by examining other ways in which he might have succeeded, such as using a lottery insider, putting weighted balls in the machine and hypnotising the security man who guards it. But he emphasised that he had done none of those things, and the Lottery authorities would be outraged at any suggestion that he could have done it that [highly illegal] way in any case.

Expanding on his ‘country fair’ averaging method, Brown said he had gathered a panel of 24 people who wrote down their predictions after studying last year’s winning numbers. Then they added up all the guesses for each ball and divided it by 24 to get the average guess. On the first go they only got one number right, on the second attempt they managed three and on the third they guessed four. By the time of last week’s draw they had honed their technique to get six correct guesses, and these were the numbers shown on the Wednesday night program, Brown said.

Brown claims that the predictions were correct because of the “wisdom of the crowd” theory which suggests that a large group of people making average guesses will come up with the correct figure as an average of all their attempts. He also suggested that if the people were motivated by money, it may not work. Brown said: “That concludes the tale of how we reached Wednesday night.

All of my 24 people who were there know what happened and the success they had. “But it’s quite possible that many of you simply won’t believe it. So you may choose not to believe any of what I’ve told you. Maybe you’ll still believe that it was some sort of ‘super technology’, What you choose to believe is up to you.”

But, reported the Telegraph newspaper, Brown’s alleged method was rubbished by mathematicians. David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, said: “There is a difference between guessing between the weight of an ox and guessing lottery balls, which is unguessable.

“This is just a clear wind-up and complete nonsense.” Roger Heath-Brown, professor of pure mathematics at Oxford University, said: “Mathematically it is complete rubbish. It is a bluff on his part, he is doing it in some other way.”