Indefatigable Cardplayer

A small herd of psychologists, mathematicians and graduate students at North Carolina's Duke University, headed by Dr., Joseph Banks Rhine, believe they have proved the existence of Extra-Sensory Perception ("ESP"), which means telepathy and clairvoyance, by a long series of card-matching experiments. A great number of psychologists and mathematicians elsewhere do not consider that the Duke experiments prove ESP at all.So the dead cats hurled into the Duke camp have been many and pungent.

Since, in the Duke tests, a subject has five symbols to choose from each time he guesses at the symbol of a down-faced card, the Duke experimenters claim that he has a "chance expectation" of five "hits" or correct guesses in a deck of 25. Therefore, when a guesser averages eight, seven or even six hits over a long run, Rhine claims that these scores are high enough to rule out chance. Some of his opponents have claimed that he does not know the mathematics of probability well enough to make such a statement. Perhaps, they hint, if two enormous stacks of ESP cards were matched against each other, one card after another, an average of six or seven hits out of 25 might come out.

Dr. Joseph Albert Greenwood, a boyish, piano-playing Duke mathematician, some time ago undertook to rebut this suggestion, by testing the operation of pure chance on no less than 500.000 cards. Last week he announced that he had obtained an average of 4.9743 hits per 25 cards. Since this was below but closely approximate to the expected five hits per 25, Dr. Greenwood felt he had proved Dr. Rhine's point--that telepathic and clairvoyant humans can make much better scores than are obtainable by random card-matching.

The dark side of Dr. Greenwood's long and heavy labors is that most of Rhine's opponents do not think that the high scores reported are accounted for by a freak of chance, but by something else, such as sensory cues, collusion, clerical mistakes, or simply sloppy experimental procedure. Nevertheless, Duke University, which presumably approves of Dr. Rhine, rewarded Dr. Greenwood for his work by making him an assistant professor of mathematics.

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