In a seminal paper Ginzburg and Adler analyzed the bounce-back boundary conditions for the lattice Boltzmann scheme and showed that it could be made exact to second order for the Poiseuille flow if some expressions depending upon the parameters of the method were satisfied, thus defining so-called "magic parameters". Using the Taylor expansion method that one of us developed, we analyze a series of simple situations (1D and 2D) for diffusion and for linear fluid problems using bounce-back and "anti bounce-back" numerical boundary conditions. The result is that "magic parameters" depend upon the detailed choice of the moments and of their equilibrium values. They may also depend upon the way the flow is driven.Comment: 14 page

The lattice Boltzmann equation is briefly introduced using moments to clearly separate the propagation and collision steps in the dynamics. In order to identify unknown parameters we introduce a cost function and adapt control theory to the lattice Boltzmann equation to get expressions for the derivatives of the cost function vs. parameters. This leads to an equivalent of the adjoint method with the definition of an adjoint lattice Boltzmann equation.To verify the general expressions for the derivatives, we consider two elementary situations: a linearized Poiseuille flow to show that the method can be used to optimize parameters, and a nonlinear situation in which a transverse shear wave is advected by a mean uniform flow. We indicate in the conclusion how the method can be used for more realistic situations.