Forget lightning speed calculations, technological superiority and machine-like precision. Thanks to the efforts of some researchers, artificial intelligence can now create magic. "We've done a number of different tricks involving artificial intelligence," says Peter McOwan, a computer science professor at Queen Mary University of London. McOwan and his coauthor, Howard Williams, recently published a study in PLOS ONE on using search algorithms to scour the internet to find the hidden mental associations magicians can use to astound their spectators. "A piece of software is like a magic trick in that it has something that seems amazing," McOwan says.

You are presented with two decks, one with images and the other with words. The magician shuffles and distributes the decks into piles of four cards. You get to choose two piles, one from the word deck and one from the image deck, to make a hand of eight cards. Then you're invited to pick a word card and and an image card from your hand. Once you've selected a pair, you watch the magician reveal a previously written prediction about the cards you've chosen.