A bit about checkers and again about chess
“In life, chess and checkers you need to think for a long time,
to make a quick decision ”
There is a legend: in ancient times, the king of France, Louis XIV, handed the chief of the secret police “Lettre de Cache” – a special warrant for arrest and imprisonment in the Bastille, without trial, by order of the king. The eternal imprisonment, madness and slow death, was doomed to a famous conspirator.
But the conspirator turned out to be a strong man. He never thought of giving up! Every morning, in order not to weaken, he did gymnastics. His brain needed the same gymnastics. A checker game came to the rescue.
Once, the corridor watchman saw a prisoner behind a checkerboard. He scratched the board with a fingernail, and fashioned checkers from bread. The watchman was bored with his monotonous duties, and he offered the prisoner to play the game and immediately lost. Since then, the watchman and prisoner met every day at the checkerboard. The years passed unnoticed. One died, another ascended the throne, and the prisoner and watchman continued to play their endless match. In the end, the watchman learned all the secrets of the game, he noticed traps and combinations of the conspirator. The games one after another began to end in a draw. Play became uninteresting. And then the prisoner invented a new board – a hundred-cell, on which gambling drafts fought again. Since then, the people of France and began to play in the hundred-cell checkers.
And who came up with “simple checkers”? This is what Vladimir Arnold, an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the United States and Russia, said. France and England: “I learned very recently about the great discoveries of such a great mathematician, whose name is unknown, he was the main surveyor in Egypt at Pharaoh and was declared god after death, and his divine name is known, and his original name is me, anyway , I do not know. As an Egyptian god, he was called Thoth. The Greeks later began to spread his theories under the name Hermes Trismegistus, and in the Middle Ages there was a book called the Emerald Tablet, which was published several times a year, and there were many editions of this book, for example, in the Newton library, which carefully studied it. And so many things that are attributed to Newton, in fact, were already contained there. What did Thoth discover? I will list some small number of discoveries. In my opinion, every cultured person should have known that there was One, and that he discovered, and what were his great inventions. What I did not know about this until this year is a shame.
The first thing he came up with is numbers, a natural series. Before him, of course, there were numbers: 2, 3, … up to the number that expressed the amount of the entire tax paid to the Egyptian pharaoh – the number that expressed the entire annual tax existed, but there were no large numbers. The idea that numbers can be continued indefinitely, that there is no largest number, that you can always add one, that you can build a number system in which you write any numbers as large as you like – this is Thoth’s idea, this is his first idea. Today we call it the idea of actual infinity.
The second discovery, which is also very significant, is the alphabet. Before him there were hieroglyphs … The third discovery of Thoth is geometry. Geometry is literally land surveying. Thoth was entrusted with the pharaoh, he should have known, a piece of land fenced, such and such a magnitude as the harvest would bring. It depends on the area, he needed to measure these areas, draw boundaries, separate the water from the Nile, do water drainage and all these practical works. And he learned. To do this, he came up with geometry, all that we are learning now, Euclidean geometry, all this geometry – Thoth actually. In particular, Thoth and later his students measured the radius of the Earth using their geometric methods. The radius of the Earth, which they measured, was obtained by them with an error of one percent relative to modern data, this is a tremendous accuracy. Along the Nile camel caravans, from Thebes to Memphis, they walked almost along the meridian and counted the camel’s steps, thereby knowing the distance.
At the same time, by observing a polar star, one can measure the latitudes of cities and, knowing the difference in latitudes and the distance along the meridian, one can measure the radius of the Earth, and they did it very well and found the radius with an accuracy of 1% … And finally, the last his discovery, about which I will mention, is relatively small, but still interesting, what he came up with was checkers. The Indians had chess, chess was known, but this is a complex and not a folk game, he democratized chess and invented checkers. Checkers also come from him …. How did we all know this?
Now we know the Euclidean geometry. Where does Euclidean geometry come from, where did all this come from? It turns out that the study of science, which was created by Thoth, was a commercial secret of Egypt. In Alexandria there was a library (music), in which seven million volumes were stored in which all science was recorded, but it had to have special permission in order to get acquainted with this material, and it was necessary to have permission from the priests of the pyramids that all to study it.
