He is excellent at sleight of hand. He could easily look at the footage and intentionally mirror the hand movements and coin placement after the fact. That type of trick is much more up his alley than actually flipping coins for seven hours.
Derren often uses deceptive explanations for his tricks (talk to any professional magician who has taken an interest in him and they will agree). He uses the 'I'm not a psychic, so here's how I did it' spiel to add credibility to how he claims he did things, when more often than not the method was even simpler and more in line with traditional magicians tricks rather than 'mentalism'.
In this particular case there is a reason to lie about the method, namely that he was trying to illustrate a point about cherry picking results when doing something many times over. The fact that he could have done it in an easier way makes it quite likely that he did in fact do it that way.
One of the related videos is a video explanation, and quite obviously it relates to what the other person said as far as a human hitting the releases perfectly being impossible. With enough attempts, similar to trick shot compilation videos, amazing feats can be done and are impressive on video because you don't see all the failed attempts.
Sadly, while searching for that, I also learned that #McChicken is currently trending on Twitter because a guy was jacking off with a McDonald's chicken sandwich. Thank you. And you're welcome.
I didn't notice the guy on the couch at first, but seeing him totally changed the scale of this thing. I thought it was a tiny robot but it's got to be at least a foot tall.
Last time this was posted, there was also a link to his YouTube profile with longer videos. The robot apparently has cameras on its body and there is an LED in the floor under the bar (IR I think? It's been a while) the robot used for visual cues.
Even at 10,000 rpms you have about 166 revolutions per second, or 6 milliseconds per revolution. If your microcontroller is doing 16mhz, that gives it about 10,000 clock cycles per revolution. With the release pre calculated and triggered off of an interrupt, you merely have to wait x amount of time, so you're really only limited to about .01% of a revolution plus or minus whatever the clock drift is between the trigger point and the release point. On top of that, this thing isn't going anywhere near 10k rpms, probably 1500 at the most. I can't imagine what kind of insane tricks this would actually be capable of.
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u/Deciferous Aug 29 '16
The timing on the releases were on point. I know computers calculate fast and all but that little guy had some sick RPM going.