We have a normal deck of 52 cards. We want to do the following magic trick:

A person from the audience chooses 5 random cards. The magician's assistant looks at the 5 cards, chooses 4 of them, hands them to the magician one by one face up and keeps the other one hidden. The magician then guesses the fifth card (the one that the assistant kept hidden) just by looking at the 4 cards he was handed in.

Is it possible to devise a strategy, so that no matter what the original 5 cards were, the trick always works?

there must be some trick in how he laid them down. The first card determines the suit. assuming the cards having designs on the back that aren't symetrical, It can be place one of four directions. The remaining three can be used like a base four counting system. It would use four positions up, left, right, down, using the back of the card as a pointer. or I could be way off, but it might work.

Posted by Jon on 2003-05-08 07:12:39