unwise wrote:Try making up a chart like that based on other numbers over 50. They are extrememly difficult to make add up correctly. But, I'm no genius, so I leave it to you.
No, it's actually way easier for higher numbers! It's primary school level maths so no need to make excuses.
Check the above square again, but instead of 34, 35, 36, 37 use the numbers 4,5,6 and 7. You'll get a magic square resulting in 25 (=55-30). Now you see that you can easily adapt this one square to reach any number you want. These four key numbers only appear once in every horizontal, vertical or diagonal and can be increased by whatever number needed to reach the number we know the audience member has chosen.
So your impression that it's extremely' difficult to draw one up can be seen now to be a myth, a trick. Because high numbers are forced, one can just use the same one magic square over and over again. Drawing up squares for lower numbers is a bit more tricky as a square might have to be redesigned in real time (as I assumed at first was done but I didn't think it over really yet and that might take just to much time to do during the asking of the questions).
The only thing that seems to make any logical sense is that the magician either had a camera trained on the woman writing the number down and had that info radioed to him. Or, the paper is special top secret paper that can signal what has been written on it by remote control. Or the table has this.
Sure, or a combination of the above in case the woman would write the paper in some unusual way.
What would have happened if the woman had selected one of MANY numbers in which a table of figures COULD NOT add up? What would the magician do then?
As I wrote above, there's no such number, unless it would be lower than 21 perhaps which was not allowed. Not sure why 37 was chosen as limit instead but I don't want to think about it any longer.
[Edit: it must be coincedence that 37 shows up as highest number in the graph. Could have been 47 if the number to reach had to be 65 instead.]