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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 know

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?

platz 5y ago
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?
mannerheim 5y ago
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:_Origins_of_the_modern_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...
- rcoveson 5y ago
  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 http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  You're calling on examples of strongly-pedigreed, well-informed. very slight game variations, and claiming they're equivalent with a whole-cloth supposition of the rules based on nothing but an examination of the board and pieces. The gradual evolution of a well-documented game doesn't really compare with uninformed assumptions about how a game might work based on little more than mere physical artifacts.

platz 5y ago

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?

mannerheim 5y ago

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:_Origins_of_the_modern_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#1200%E2%80%931700:_Origi...

rcoveson 5y ago
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 http://www.gamecabinet.com/history/Senet.html
addingnumbers 5y ago
You're calling on examples of strongly-pedigreed, well-informed. very slight game variations, and claiming they're equivalent with a whole-cloth supposition of the rules based on nothing but an examination of the board and pieces. The gradual evolution of a well-documented game doesn't really compare with uninformed assumptions about how a game might work based on little more than mere physical artifacts.