The original Akronym effect (created by Yves Doumergue and available from Conjuring Lab) uses Wikipedia – spectators navigate through Wikipedia articles, clicking on random links and selecting words from the article titles they land on. Through letter extraction, their name is revealed. It’s a clever effect that has earned strong reviews from professional mentalists.
But it is expensive, and I wanted something that I have control over. So I decided to create my own trick with a similar revelation. So not wanting to directly copy their effect I decided to use Google Search as a means to display “random” words.
In my effect, the spectator scans a QR code on my phone and opens up a “google” search page.
Astute spectators might catch that this is at my web site, robertjwallace.com, but I can explain that this page is my solution to getting search results with ads. This page searches and tells google not to return any ads (hey magicians do lie 🙂
After they get to this page I ask them to roll a die, in their mind if there isn’t one available. They tell me what they rolled.
i tell them to enter in any simple search, such as their hobby or their profession, for example “magic”.
A “searching” spinner appears and then after a moment the search results are shown.
In this example the spectator, named Andy, said he rolled a two. So I ask him to read off the second word from each title:
- Magia
- Industrial
- Admission
- Eye
Then I circle the second letter, because they rolled a 2, and they see their name “a n d y”
I don’t know any of the features of the Akronym effect, but for my effect I coded multiple outs. These outs are coded on the results page so a quick glance at the screen can tell me what I need to do to the reveal, including the case where the search did not find a solution.
I coded this using claude.ai for the coding. I have my own server that hosts the google page. Google has antibot software making it difficult to get their search results, so I ended up installing a search engine on my home network, searXNG which is working great. Since my website is hosted on a shared server at Bluehost.com, it was easier to have claude.ai write a WordPress plugin that manages the interface between the google search page and the searXNG engine on my home network.
Conclusión
I am more and more impressed with how fast AI is moving in niche applications. While a little technical knowledge is helpful, I found it remarkably easy to create this and other phone apps for Android phones.
One key is that I use more open platforms. I run my home computers on Linux, not on Mac or Windows. I use WordPress which is a very open platform. My phone is an Android which lets me directly install apps, rather than forcing me to use an app store.