Single Comment

It's amazing how every rethorical wepon, even Nazism-bashing, managed to be
squeezed into that article.

With all due respect to Mr. Sloan, who is certainly more knowledgeable in
many things than me, his views aren't exactly as waterproof as they
sound.

'The people there are primarily desert dwellers. They are great merchants
and traders. Their caravans can easily penetrate all the way from Arabia
to China. However, to say that these people, the vast majority of whom
even today cannot read and write, invented a game like chess, is
ridiculous, and I am sure that my many friends in Pakistan will agree with
me.' This part, specifically, made me shake my head in disbelief.
People who travel in the desert know very well that a lot of the time must
be spent resting, with little else to do. Saying people with arithmetic
gifts (from being merchants) and navigational skills can't invent even
pre-chaturanga is underrating the power of boredom :-). They had go
boards, of course, since China was so important economically... but go is
a complicated, unpractical game and the desert isn't exactly the most
comfortable place. So they get the 9x9 boards and start trying to think up
some new, faster game. Not as far-fetched as he tries to make it sound.

To me it looks rather likely that since the chinese were used to go,
placing the pieces on the crossings rather than on the squares was a
natural adaptation. The opposite, (almost) everyone else changing the game
to play on squares, has no logic explanation.

And elephants aren't exactly the most common animals in China, just as
much as horses aren't seen in India in great numbers, but he dismisses the
elephant issue, while at the same time considering the horse-issue
crucial.

Then there's the cultural aspect. He claims that Chinese play lots of
chess, while Indians don't, as if Hollywood should be in Paris since the
French invented cinema. The Indian culture, if one can truly consider it
just one, is perhaps the richest, most complicated and alien to the
westerner. But gaming isn't a main concern for them, and has never been -
many other forms of entertainment are more successful. And claiming that
the Chinese are better mathematicians than the Indians is absolutely
ludicrous.

I am not saying I am convinced that it was created in India, not in China,
and I don't exactly care much and don't believe it can ever be known for
certain - there will always be someone to claim chess was played in
Atlantis in 5000 B.C. (and hopefully another to point and laugh at that).

But still, I liked the background music of the article.