[HN Gopher] Senet
___________________________________________________________________
Senet
Author : tosh
Score : 243 points
Date : 2021-07-19 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| AvocadoCake wrote:
| I found the game strangely addictive:
| http://www.playonlinedicegames.com/senet
| krylon wrote:
| So when chess was first played, this game was already ancient.
| That is pretty cool.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Chess is old, but not as old as backgammon. And backgammon is
| an evolved version of this game.
|
| There are 3 ancient games still played commonly: chess,
| backgammon, and go.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I find it interesting that they span three very broad genres
| of gameplay:
|
| * deterministic with heterogeneous pieces
|
| * deterministic with homogeneous pieces
|
| * nondeterministic
| gnatman wrote:
| I was introduced to senet via the 1995 pc game "Nile: Passage to
| Egypt"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile:_Passage_to_Egypt
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > Espen Aarseth asked if the game Senet could be said to still
| exist, given that the rules were unknown. In response, Alexander
| de Voogt of the American Museum of Natural History pointed out
| that games did not have a fixed set of rules, but rules varied
| over time and from place to place.
|
| The game is the rules. Those people played different games. If
| you can do anything you want with it, it's a toy, not a game.
|
| If everyone forgot and lost the rules to pinochle, would we say
| pinochle still exists because people are playing poker with the
| same deck of cards?
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| I get your point, but really is anything like this so black and
| white? What about "house-rules"? If I am playing Pinochle with
| several additional house-rules (that either add or subtract
| from the "official" Pinochle rules) then what am I playing? On
| one hand I could see the argument that I am technically no
| longer playing official Pinochle, but it seems wrong to say
| that I am playing a game that is completely distinct from
| Pinochle. It seems more accurate to describe games (and
| honestly most other human activities) as existing on a
| continuum of more-or-less instead of a rather black and white
| boolean reality.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| You'd be playing a variant that directly evolved from
| pinochle. There's an undeniable lineage there.
|
| If you reverse-engineered your own rules from scratch knowing
| nothing but what a deck of cards looked like, it would be
| silly to claim you'd rediscovered pinochle.
|
| Say we fling a chess set out into space and ten million years
| later and alien civilization discovers it and concocts a game
| where they take turns placing pieces on the board like some
| elaborately-scored tic-tac-toe, would you say they
| rediscovered Chess?
| mannerheim wrote:
| It's funny you should mention chess, because early modern
| chess was at one time considered just a variant of
| chess[0]:
|
| > The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece toward
| the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had
| become the most powerful piece;[64] in light of that,
| modern chess was often referred to at the time as "Queen's
| Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[65]
|
| There was still some variation in the rules until the 19th
| century:
|
| > The rules concerning stalemate were finalized in the
| early 19th century. Also in the 19th century, the
| convention that White moves first was established (formerly
| either White or Black could move first). Finally, the rules
| around castling were standardized - variations in the rules
| of castling had persisted in Italy until the late 19th
| century.
|
| Is chess with different castling rules still chess? Chess
| without en passant?
|
| Plus, it's easier to point to the set of rules that were
| standardised in the 19th century and call that chess. For a
| game like senet, there may never have been a standard set
| of rules. Or there may have been multiple standards that
| were all fairly popular, like poker.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:
| _Origi...
| rcoveson wrote:
| This is a great example of the fallacy of gray.
|
| Compare the changes to the rules of chess you've
| described to the descriptions of senet's rules referenced
| by the wikipedia article[0]. If these are the best
| attempts at senet rule reconstruction that the article
| author could find, then I must assume that the rules are
| basically made up from scratch with nothing but a game
| board, some pieces, and the vaguest of references to the
| game in ancient texts. Familiarity with one of these so-
| called senet rulesets would be of no use at all to
| somebody playing the other, and I'm sure familiarity with
| both would be of no use at all to somebody wishing to
| play senet with any ancient player.
|
| Classifications can be fuzzy, but they're not just a
| giant meaningless void of gray where anything goes. Chess
| has variants that can be placed on an evolutionary tree.
| Senet appears to have nothing but a handful of naive
| attempts at total reconstruction from practically no
| information. The game that was historically called senet
| appears to be lost.
|
| 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
| platz wrote:
| If you fling a chess set out into space, once it is
| disconnected from it's environment, does it enter a
| macroscopic superposition of states and start playing
| itself?
| samatman wrote:
| This question is more like asking whether a card game qualifies
| as poker.
|
| There is no natural boundary with which to say that a game has
| so many variants from Platonic poker as to no longer qualify.
| Any abstraction proposed as a criterion for classification is
| just that, an abstraction, since poker is a socially-
| constructed category.
| JackFr wrote:
| Well technically a pinochle deck is different from a deck you'd
| play poker with.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Of course you're right. But the rules are not entirely unknown.
| For example, archeologists found the pieces. So, they know the
| dice are involved. And they likely correspond to rules for
| other similar games (roll and move, like backgammon or Ur).
|
| So, it's not entirely black and white. Historians are pretty
| sure about some of the rules, but it's possible there were
| other rules we don't know. The rules played today are a balance
| between historical accuracy, and just trying the different
| theories and playing the one that seems the most fun.
|
| That might seem like just making things up, but that's what the
| quote is referring to. It's hard to say what set of rules was
| the most common, but there is some reason to believe that the
| current set of rules is as least _similar_ , and might have
| been played due to the way that these games didn't have 1
| concrete set of rules. "House rules" meant that there was often
| many different sets of rules in place. Think how checkers has
| sets of rules that allow for non-forced jumps, flying kings,
| etc. Maybe your can't tell whether your set of rules was the
| most common set, but if your rules are based on evidence, it's
| likely that it was played similar to that somewhere.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I urge you to read the sets of rules invented by the senet
| historians referenced in the wikipedia article. I think you
| are overstating their knowledge of the game. From wikipedia:
|
| "Although details of the original game rules are a subject of
| some conjecture, senet historians Timothy Kendall and R. C.
| Bell have made their own reconstructions of the game."
|
| Here is the citation[0].
|
| My belief is that these are two completely different games,
| and therefor probably completely different from any ancient
| iteration of senet.
|
| Using the same game board and (some of) the same pieces is
| totally insufficient to call a game a "variation". Is old
| Japanese text, which adopted the Chinese writing system, a
| variant of the Chinese language?
|
| 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
| comicjk wrote:
| The rules are what matters, yes, but the naming of games is a
| classification problem over sets of rules. This is most obvious
| with competitive video games, which have complex rules that are
| tweaked often - each balance patch changes the rules a little,
| but it's still the same game. The boundaries are fuzzy, and
| even the players may disagree about what constitutes enough
| change to be a different game.
|
| With Senet, we don't even know how much the rules have changed,
| so it's hard to say. But hopefully the reconstructors did well
| enough that an ancient player wouldn't say "what game is that?"
| but instead "that's a goofy way to play Senet."
| rcoveson wrote:
| Here is the reference wikipedia gives for the two historians
| who have tried reconstructing the rules[0].
|
| It seems that only "tomb images" and some game boards and
| pieces are used in the reconstruction. The article doesn't
| suggest that _any_ rules have a basis in history. What rules
| we have are fabricated from nothing but the pieces, like
| reconstructing the English language from nothing but the
| alphabet.
|
| 0. http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
| platz wrote:
| A video game with two hundred thousand lines of code doesn't
| seem like an apt comparison to a board game.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Pretty close to a physical sport, if we assume that most of
| that code is involved in simulating something resembling
| physics, or in running simple robot players.
|
| Like, how much of a basketball game is concerned with the
| actual Rules Of Basketball vs. simulating a bunch of people
| playing basketball? And if you made Space Basketball with
| characters with superpowers who kept getting balance tweaks
| as the player community figured out holes in the rules,
| most of that simulation code would stay the same, as the
| tiny percentage of rules code evolved.
| ggggtez wrote:
| The modern rules are largely just a guess, but the rulesets I've
| played with are... so-so. There is enough excitement, I guess,
| but nearly every game comes down to 50/50 luck. It's incredibly
| difficult to gain any sort of strategic edge.
|
| It's a curiosity,. But you should probably rather be playing
| backgammon.
| peter303 wrote:
| In the Ten Commandment movie Nefertiti plays a different actual
| Egyptian game called Hounds and Jackals.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| I remember getting the game as part of a collectors edition of
| the show LOST. Used to play it quite a bit.
| platz wrote:
| You played a modern interpretation. No one knows what the
| original game was.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I remember as a kid having a shareware sampler that had some very
| nicely done videogame versions of Senet, Hnefatafl, the Royal
| Game of Ur, and some sort of a Pueblo board game . Peak late 90s
| skeumorphism, complete with little rendered win/loss cutscenes.
| Unless I can find that CD, it's probably gone forever though
| themodelplumber wrote:
| There are a lot of people out there who remember shareware CDs.
| I'm always surprised by that particular aspect of software
| nostalgia. Same with things like ads in computer magazines;
| lots of people remember extremely well.
|
| Did the game happen to be one of these?
|
| https://archive.org/search.php?query=senet%20shareware
| thrower123 wrote:
| I think it is the Steve Neeley one, actually
| anthk wrote:
| I think you have these at https://wiby.me by searching "Windows
| 98".
|
| I can't remember the URL right now, but there was a game
| collection full of items with "real life mimicking" pieces.
| taejo wrote:
| The Internet Archive has a collection of those shareware
| samplers, maybe yours is there?
| https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive
| wanda wrote:
| > Senet is the oldest known board game.
|
| I was always under the impression that a form of backgammon was
| on the ancient Mesopotamian/Sumerian scene around the same time
| -- though, now that I actually come to look for a good source to
| support that notion, I'm struggling to find one.
|
| Wikipedia and other sources just say "backgammon can be traced
| back nearly 5000 years" [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgammon
| mabub24 wrote:
| You might be thinking of Ur, which is roughly 4,500 years old.
| This is an interesting video from Dr. Irving Finkel on it and
| its playing rules.[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I
| guard-of-terra wrote:
| There are quite a few rulesets for the board. It's hard to
| say how exactly the inventors has played it. In this video
| the basic ruleset is shown. More advanced sets make use of
| more tile types, of pieces being two-sided - so that pieces
| have to return where they have started from, after being
| flipped at the opposite side of the board.
| dang wrote:
| A couple small past threads:
|
| _Senet: the original board game of death?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288441 - Feb 2020 (6
| comments)
|
| _Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099052 - Feb 2016 (5
| comments)
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur for
| which we have guessed at the probable rules and can play it
| today.
| acheron wrote:
| There's a great video on YouTube of Irving Finkel (quite an
| interesting guy) playing the Royal Game of Ur.
| https://youtu.be/WZskjLq040I
| amitport wrote:
| I once won an AI tournament for senet :) so for me this post
| relates to AI... But still... it's a mystery how this gets to the
| top of HN
| ggggtez wrote:
| What's the best strategy? I barely notice any strategic edge,
| or even penality for making moves that look bad.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I once won an AI tournament for senet :)
|
| When and where was that? More details please? :)
| OJFord wrote:
| > it's a mystery how this gets to the top of HN
|
| Because people (such as me!) found it interesting and up-voted
| it.
|
| Per the guidelines:
|
| > What to Submit
|
| > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
| That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
| reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
| gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| comicjk wrote:
| Random wiki pages are one of the things that give HN its
| pleasant Old Internet atmosphere to me. Sometimes I've thought
| about sampling over wikipedia uniformly at random, submitting
| to HN, and observing the trends in what rises to the top.
| coldpie wrote:
| Hahaha. Have you ever clicked the "Random Article" button on
| Wikipedia? I learned the world has a _lot_ of tiny villages
| no one has ever heard of.
| bckr wrote:
| What if there were a recommender system in the loop that
| looked at which articles tend to be voted up and then would
| be more likely to submit articles that it thought HN would
| find interesting -- would a uniform distribution filtered
| by a "probability to be well-upvoted" be a good way to do
| this?
| karmakaze wrote:
| Too bad we don't know the rules. Also, I think it's one of the
| oldest board games including Go and Backgammon.
| raunak wrote:
| Anyone else know about senet from the Rick Riordan series The
| Kane Chronicles?
| zests wrote:
| I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and
| how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years.
| The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is
| revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new
| popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our
| understanding of the game evolves.
| primus202 wrote:
| I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on
| chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so
| many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules.
|
| I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance.
| The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge"
| across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into
| rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never
| capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead
| is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no!
|
| So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.
| satchlj wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.
|
| In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the
| earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future
| and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of
| square ones.
|
| I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't
| understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the
| idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal
| frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.
| simonh wrote:
| It may be they were mimicking the shape of knuckle bones.
| satchlj wrote:
| Just bought "It's All a Game" - looking forward to reading
| it!
| lllllll0 wrote:
| > I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for
| instance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin
|
| Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.
| capableweb wrote:
| Seems like the precursors might have originated from India
| but what would evolve into what we today call "Chess" seems
| to have been taking shape in Persia (Iran).
| renewiltord wrote:
| Do the historians who track these things have some metric
| that they determine that separates 'precursors' from the
| game itself or is it a human "you know it when you see
| it" or consensus? Just curious. I imagine it's something
| similar to how we answer the question "Are these distinct
| species?" (which doesn't really have a great answer).
| jcmeyrignac wrote:
| Some researchers try to rebuild the original rules from these
| old games, using AI: https://ludii.games
|
| About Senet, a few rules have been suggested:
| https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet
| zentiggr wrote:
| I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of
| an otherwise very structured ruleset.
| goblinux wrote:
| Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I've seen of this.
| It's on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a
| look if you like "bad chess"
| legitster wrote:
| Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the
| Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in
| games.
|
| He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be
| a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player
| game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally
| will want to remove random elements from the game.
|
| But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is
| important to attract players - there's a softening of skill
| gaps.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Yeah, add health to pieces and use dice to determine what
| happens when pawn takes the queen: roll 5 and your queen
| wins, but with 1/3 health.
|
| That would really suck.
| mcguire wrote:
| Greg Costikyan's book _Uncertainty in Games_ is another good
| source.
|
| And this topic frequently comes up in wargaming circles
| (frequently enough to be annoying :-)). Some feel that
| nondeterminism is a crutch for the low-skilled while others
| feel that it is the only reasonable way to handle a low-
| fidelity model of reality or that it teaches the valuable
| skill of how to deal with the bag of rotten lemons that the
| universe periodically hands you.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > some even being a 4 player game with dice!
|
| Charutaji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturaji
| mikepurvis wrote:
| In many games, it's pretty clearly part of the design that
| the random elements are there to provide rubber-banding--
| particularly in games with more than 2 players, where
| sometimes you try to win without looking too much like it, so
| you avoid getting ganged up on (think: the robber in
| Settlers).
| da_chicken wrote:
| You can see his lecture on YouTube:
|
| https://youtu.be/dSg408i-eKw
|
| You can tell he's going a little from memory, but the points
| are all still there. His arguments that skill and luck are
| not opposite sides of the same spectrum is quite good.
| mod wrote:
| In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me
| agree.
|
| Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very
| difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best
| players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening
| by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner
| breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it.
|
| Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance
| (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and
| years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the
| best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still
| going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at
| this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year
| itching to play.
|
| I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the
| modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of
| computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of
| solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in
| real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be
| developed. More computational power could change that in the
| future, I guess.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants
| people actually _play_ get tackled by machines.
|
| Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an
| approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold
| Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker
| with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other
| approximately perfect strategies, which would break even
| against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it.
| The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky
| briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette.
|
| In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play
| the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of
| fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's
| important to note that while the strategy is _unbeatable_
| it is not the best way to extract money from weaker
| players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need
| to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5
| /$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on
| trying to break even with a machine.
|
| Heads Up _No_ Limit which was still being played a fair
| amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus
| beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike
| Cepheus, Pluribus doesn 't have an incredibly boring yet
| precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a
| result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to
| humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.
| mod wrote:
| You've picked two of the easier games to solve--heads up
| games. More specifically, heads up games with specific
| stack depth
|
| There is no AI that can play well, for instance, in a
| 9-handed game with varying stack sizes, while itself and
| some competent players are 600BB deep and some other
| players are 40bb deep.
|
| It takes a specific, narrow ruleset to tailor an AI to be
| able to play it at such a high level. Or more compute
| than we currently have in real-time.
|
| Pluribus' matches against pros had each hand reset to
| 100BB.
|
| Also, notably, the bot can still lose in the short term
| to terrible players, which was the thrust of my post. In
| fact, given its bluffing frequency, it might actually do
| worse against weaker players than it did against pros.
| Additionally, no human can realistically implement an AI
| strategy, meaning the AI is not a big detriment to the
| actual game of poker, as it's currently played.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Good to note that Pluribus is trained with Counterfactual
| Regret Minimization rather than deep learning, same as
| Libratus, the first AI player to beat professional
| players in Heads up no limit Texas Hold' em.
|
| I'm not sure about the relation between Pluribus and
| Libratus- I think Pluribus is a newer version of
| Libratus, essentially?
| failrate wrote:
| I enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One
| recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided"
| randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of
| more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I
| usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule:
| 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe
| will usher in new popular variants...
|
| It's going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games
| getting "frozen" with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules
| too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example,
| with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in
| the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can't make
| house rules without programming your own variant.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Digital games could do the same, when you can't make house
| rules without programming your own variant.
|
| Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and
| online distribution make it easier to make and share variants
| than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject
| to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP
| status) of the base game.
| shusaku wrote:
| It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the
| rules and having it play itself (no database required to
| bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough
| processing power) since you will always be able to find a
| partner.
| toxik wrote:
| I think paying an AI won't be very satisfying, though. You
| can't do sneaky things to a player that is essentially
| statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it's likely
| not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just
| found a pattern it didn't know. It's dead, cold, calculating.
| Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you
| can talk about it, "ha, you could've mated me then in two
| moves," etc.
|
| Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.
| andrepd wrote:
| The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.
| guard-of-terra wrote:
| ...especially when played with ruleset where different tiles
| have specific rules.
| joemi wrote:
| I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very
| chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to
| learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters
| (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get
| familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy
| enough.
|
| Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to
| the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored
| pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong
| to.
|
| Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a
| better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's
| king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two
| sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a
| catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown
| a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just
| relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to
| play, IMO.
| colordrops wrote:
| It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which
| makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could
| be what makes it fun.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess
|
| Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi
| has 20 on a side.
| colordrops wrote:
| Well would you look at that, you are right. The different
| layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It
| even has the same number of different types.
| mcguire wrote:
| And then there's hnefatafl
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games).
| Revery42 wrote:
| I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an
| independent project right now! It got me thinking and
| researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far
| is Fog of War.
| mcguire wrote:
| Have you looked at InfoChess?
| (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-
| permu...)
| btilly wrote:
| _It 's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been
| changed slightly over time for 1000 years._
|
| Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark
| example, the queen did not get her modern move until around
| 1450.
|
| _The game has since been stable for about 500._
|
| And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first
| suggested in 1857.
| lupire wrote:
| "white moves first" is an arbitrary/aesthetic/logistic
| choice, that doesn't affect gameplay logic.
|
| Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though?
| It's just a convention.
| rodrigosetti wrote:
| Yes, if our definition of "game" is broadened to mean
| "culture" around this tradition (as historians might),
| rather than just reducing to the rules.
|
| In this sense, it also includes the conventions, skill-
| level titles, playing etiquette, etc.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does "white moves first" actually affect the game,
| though?
|
| Materially, no, though it probably makes it less complex
| for humans by slightly simplifying the pattern recognition
| issues, particularly in the opening.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Statistically, white wins more than black.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Because white goes first. The phrasing and context
| becomes important. There are two statements that are true
| but without them as context you end up with a misleading
| notion:
|
| First player wins more than second in chess (because
| there's a slight advantage).
|
| White goes first in chess.
|
| Therefore, white wins more than black in chess.
|
| However, that conclusion (what you present) is valueless
| without the context. If you reversed which color starts
| the game then we'd end up with "black wins more than
| white in Chess" as a conclusion and your statement would
| be false. And if there was no specific color which always
| started, we'd be left with just the first statement:
| First player wins more than second in chess.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| First player advantage seems to be consensus but I wonder
| how much of an effect piece layout has for players
| playing second.
|
| If you reversed the king and queen placement for both
| players would the advantage be as great?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Unless there are hidden psychological effects (which good
| players will attempt to surmount, as a matter of course),
| mirroring the board placement will make no difference.
|
| There is no asymmetry of moves other than the starting
| position of the king and queen, so all strategy will
| simply be mirrored if the king and queen are mirrored.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What did the queen do before then?
| btilly wrote:
| The queen was called a fers, and could only move one space
| diagonally according to most descriptions.
| gus_massa wrote:
| More details:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess#History
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Even more details, like how Queen Isabella may have
| inspired the change and that it was common to declare the
| queen in "check" for quite some time.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(chess)#History
| iamjake648 wrote:
| I can't remember the exact book, but contained in a book about
| Ancient Egypt, there was the rules, paper pieces and a sample
| board for this game - we used to play it all the time as kids.
|
| My grandpa helped us make a wooden set of pieces and a board
| before he passed, it was a a great little intro to woodworking
| project.
| tallies wrote:
| Egyptology?
| iamjake648 wrote:
| yup, that's the one!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Looks a bit like Mancala. I don't know much about Senet, but we
| played Mancala all the time, when I was a kid (in Africa).
| amitport wrote:
| Well it's more like backgammon
| samatman wrote:
| Intriguingly, mancala is the Egyptian Arabic name for that
| game.
|
| Some very early boards from e.g. Aksum in Ethiopia were
| identified by archaelogists as mancala boards, but are more
| likely to have been for Senet.
|
| It's probable that the Ancient Egyptians played both, but I
| don't believe the record is clear on where mancala came from
| and at what time it reached Egypt, presuming that isn't where
| it came from, which it might be.
| metaphor wrote:
| Apparently, variants abound.
|
| I grew up on a small island in the Pacific and played something
| similar[1] called chongka' as a kid as well.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_mancala
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