Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are successfully used for various design and optimisation tasks, and have previously been applied to design magic tricks. A magical effect is an event that the observer perceives as being outside the normal physical rules of the world. In this paper we revisit an AI framework that has been used to produce a two dimensional interlocking piece jigsaw design...

In the Harry Potter stories [R], each new year at the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry starts with the ceremonial assignment of the new first-year students to one of the four houses: Griffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. This is a milestone for the young students because their assigned houses greatly influence their future direction. The crucial assignment process is entr...

This paper will explore the role and practices of magic-using folk healers - curandeiros and saludadores - in early modern Portuguese society. The article will examine the ambivalent place of the folk healer as a figure both central to and marginal in Portuguese popular culture. In considering some of the services offered by unlicensed popular healers and their recourse to the unorthodox magica...

Throughout Antiquity magical amulets written on papyri, lead and silver were used for apotropaic reasons. While papyri often can be unrolled and deciphered, metal scrolls, usually very thin and tightly rolled up, cannot easily be unrolled without damaging the metal. This leaves us with unreadable results due to the damage done or with the decision not to unroll the scroll. The texts vary greatl...

We show that scattering amplitudes in magical, symmetric or homogeneous N=2 Maxwell-Einstein supergravities can be obtained as double copies of two gauge theories, using the framework of color-kinematics duality. The left-hand copy is N=2 super-Yang-Mills theory coupled to a hypermultiplet, whereas the right-hand copy is a nonsupersymmetric theory that can be identified as the dimensional reduc...

The predictive validities of several indicators of psychosis proneness were evaluated in a 10-year longitudinal study (N = 508). As hypothesized, high scorers on the Perceptual Aberration Scale, Magical Ideation Scale, or both (n = 182), especially those who initially reported psychoticlike experiences of at least moderate deviance, exceeded control subjects (n = 153) on psychoses (revised 3rd ...

Through an extensive experimental analysis of over 900 possible configurations of a fault-tolerant middleware system, we present empirical evidence that the unpredictability inherent in such systems arises from merely 1% of the remote invocations. The occurrence of very high latencies cannot be regulated through parameters such as the number of clients, the replication style and degree or the r...

How do children learn language? Is it already in their heads when they are born, or do they acquire language through experience? Is it possible to program a computer to learn a language using techniques which are possibly available to the human infant? Grammatical Inference strives to automatically infer a grammar for a language from a subset of the strings in the language, and possibly also a ...

We are fortunate in having a number of sources for reconstructing the epidemiology of occupational diseases in pharaonic Egypt and the religious, magical, and medical means of treatment available to workmen engaged in various projects and tasks. In addition to the inscriptions which the leaders and personnel of official expeditions often left in the desert,1 we have a rich collection of records...