Derren Brown

He did predict the lottery. I thought there was another show which showed exactly how he predicted them?

This is how he says he predicted the numbers:

Illusionist Derren Brown stunned the nation after apparently predicting the winning lottery numbers on live television, but he claimed it all came down to mathematics.

In a follow-up show last night, watched by 3 million people, Brown said he used "a powerful, beautiful secret that can only be achieved when we all put our heads together."

He went on to say that he had gathered a panel of 24 people who wrote down their predictions after studying the last year's worth of numbers.

The guesses for each ball were then added up and divided by 24 to get the average guess.

Brown said it took a while to perfect the "deep maths" technique.

According to him, 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.

But the article finishes with this little gem:

And Roger Heath-Brown, professor of pure mathematics at Oxford University, told The Guardian: "Mathematically it is complete rubbish. It is a bluff on his part, he is doing it in some other way."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hJwPR3-EkEKnRAfvpdd9…

[quote=wednesday]Is there maths behind random numbers?

[/quote]

Yes probability.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqAt2akPHJ8]

[quote=Beast]He went on to say that he had gathered a panel of 24 people who wrote down their predictions after studying the last year's worth of numbers.[/quote]

So.. he watched a episode of Doctor who :/

Thats BS. The only way to do that would be that one of the shows is not live. Or theres a slight time delay. Its very similar to an illusion iv seen before.

I remember a trick where he flipped a coin 10 times and got heads every time. And it wasn't a trick coin, he REALLY did it.

What are the odds of that? About 1 in 1024.

So, how did he do it? He actually filmed himself flipping the coin over and over again for hours, and then just cut the tape to look as if he'd done it in his first 10 flips.

14 million * 15 seconds = approximately 160 years. I doubt that was the way.

It could have been a trick projecting the numbers onto the balls, but that would ahve been difficult.

It could also have been e-ink paper with some transmitter.

There could potentially be some time delay involved, but the BBC say they do not delay the broadcast. Well, I think he says the bbc say that...

There could have been a false wall somewhere or other camera trick which hid the person putting the correct numbers into place.

14 million alternate realities and we were in the right one?

Brown Lotto trick 'confuses' fans

Many fans and critics have been left confused by illusionist Derren Brown's explanation of how he appeared to predict Wednesday's lottery results.

Some 4.6m viewers saw him claim to have asked 24 people to guess the six Lotto balls and use an average of the total for each ball to predict the draw.

But some mathematicians have dismissed his explanation as "complete nonsense".

And on blogging site Twitter one fan said he was "still confused", while another called it a "massive letdown".

Read more @ BBC News

So people actually expected him to reveal all? Not watched any of his shows, but I would be surprised if he had done that.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqAt2akPHJ8]

Could it have been this?