[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]
Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
Odalisque Chess. Magnetic rotating three dimensional chess variant. (16x(1x4), Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]We cite Bell's other Infinite Ring at ChessboardMath5 8.January.2009 challenge number (28). Is one dimension already one dim. too many? Why does Odalisque, notwithstanding the risky name, seem like 1-D instead of 3-D? It is imaginatively as if 2-D is omitted altogether, like a hole in the head. Odalisque at sixteen is exactly the same height as Ramayana Buddha's board 16x4 wide, both being high and narrow. The same thread challenges 3.January.2009 to ''(2) Design a CV without a board, where pieces competitively mutate, until one team's pieces exhaust.'' Dispensing with boards means return to Rock-Scissors-Paper, the unannotated wasteland. Plain ChessboardMath 19.February.2008 refounds that as Rock-Fire-Scissors-Paper, because of the need Rook:Rock, Falcon:Fire, Bishop:Scissors, Knight:Paper. You remember rock the clenched fist, fire the thumbs or digit up...paper the flat palm. The new Fire is like let it burn, baby! But the flaw is that Rock-scissors and Fire-paper now become undefined. That's okay because 33% Draws are an improvement on anything. Oh, I forgot: Rock curses fire, which cures scissors, which cuts paper, which covers rock. Lo seriously one dim.wd. is quite an achievement here:
Obelisque, odalisque, what's one word or another since chess is nonverbal, like tic'tac'toe or the deadly Rock,fire,scissors,paper martial art routine; or CV art or CaVe art, withal evocative caveats. Now it is not easy to find 16x4 sizes, but this makes two of them, in assembling material to plumb the depths of Ramayana Bhuddha's board. Now Odalisque is October 2002 and Ramayana is November 2002 in serendipity. Betza's 2x2x16 Race Chess is about the same thing January 2003.
Odalisque's comments were for being 4x16 like Ramayana. I ran across 'Odalisque' in print in Isabel Fonseca's 'Bury Me Standing' pp. 125-126, Vintage paperback 1995. ''...And rugs, depicting Biblical scenes, peacocks, and voluptuous odalisques reclining in a harem setting.'' Not intending a pun, Robert Bell means Obelisque not Odalisque, and some miscarriage continues to be advanced here in the name. Now 'BMS' is the famous Gypsy book, and if Gypsies had emigrated en masse from India by 10th Century, having arrived at Persia by 700 as Zotts, could they have had something indirectly with dissemination of Chess? Murray may or may not document anything like this idea, as Gypsies are more ignored or less understood than other European societies. The Caliph of Baghdad, heir to the great chess-player Al-Rashid, sent troops in 820 against the Zott-Gypsies. This research is preliminary, and some Zotts appear earlier in Persia 5th-century. There is also the legend among Gypsies of the fourth nail forged for the crucifixion of Yeshua. For eventual follow-up, the versions bear upon justification for the peripatetic tradition as well as the ordinary utility that only three nails were used and his feet drawn together, and the mythic fourth just keeps making its rounds among the descendants of the Gypsy forger-blacksmith. [same source]
3 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.