
Rithmomachy - fogus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rithmomachy
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_pius
Holy cow. Seeing this here brings back a lot of memories.

The first serious coding I ever did was back in 1999 on a team that
implemented parallelized, adaptive game-playing algorithms for this game on
the Cray T3E.

[http://www-pgss.mcs.cmu.edu/Publications/Volume18/Rhythmomac...](http://www-
pgss.mcs.cmu.edu/Publications/Volume18/Rhythmomachy.pdf)

Funny reading back through the paper:

 _The Cray T3E supercomputer is currently ranked the twenty-third fastest
computer in the world. The Cray’s speed does not come from just one processor,
however. The T3E gains its speed from 512 450-megahertz networked processors._

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ig1
Wikipedia tends to be pretty poor on historical board games, as a lot of
populist books have been written on the topic which focus more on
entertainment rather than accuracy.

Here's an original source Fulke's period work on the topic:
<http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/fulke.html>

And here's a reconstruction filling in gaps in Fulke using other primary
sources: <http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/game-recon-rhythbasics.html>

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andrewcooke
thanks. if that's your page you may want to fix a small error - a "3" in the
example on geomteric proportions should be "2".

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jackchristopher
Play it now. Here's a Java Web Applet (downloadable too):
<http://symbolaris.com/applet/Rhythmomachia.html>

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anigbrowl
The first thought I had on seeing the rectangular board is that this would
make a fine iPhone application. Thanks for the interesting find.

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eru
If you like this kind of game..

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mleonhard
Why did people stop playing it?

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fhars
Because it is boring to play. I once was on a study week on historical
mathematical games with several historians of mathematics, and even we got
bored of the game after an evening. It is designed to teach a certain medieval
conception of composed numbers and not to be playable, so there are for
example several pieces that are very hard to take by normal rules, because the
opposite players has no pieces that combine to the required number for taking
it.

