Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Odd-Even Divided Deck

This variety of divided deck, used for card locations, seems to predate the red-black divided deck by centuries. It appeared in an unpublished manuscript known as Sloane 424, c. 1600s, p. 142 of the Pieper translation. Pieper's translation of this anonymous manuscript was published in Gibecière, Vol. 5 No. 2, Summer 2010, p. 141-172.

A variant of the arranged division of two groups of values is described in Edem Guyot's Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques, Vol. 2, 1769, p. 261: “Recreation 80: To Guess Multiple Cards That Two Persons Have Taken in a Game”. In a footnote, it is pointed out that other arrangements may be used for dividing a deck into two distinct groups.