LIFE A users manual: Georges Perec
The ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles:
"Despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other."
A wonderful book and its made me cross. Such an amazing idea and although the idea is not a new one its still blows my mind! It uses the 'Knights Tour' which I did look at last year for my fairy tale project. I'm still at the moment looking into this as it is how I plan to write my interactive novel but more about that when I finish this MA. The Knight's Tour is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. There are several billion solutions to the problem, of which about 122,000,000 have the knight finishing on a square from which it attacks the starting square. Such a tour is described as closed. Otherwise the tour is open Many variations on this topic have been studied by mathematicians, including Euler, over the centuries using:
A wonderful book and its made me cross. Such an amazing idea and although the idea is not a new one its still blows my mind! It uses the 'Knights Tour' which I did look at last year for my fairy tale project. I'm still at the moment looking into this as it is how I plan to write my interactive novel but more about that when I finish this MA. The Knight's Tour is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. There are several billion solutions to the problem, of which about 122,000,000 have the knight finishing on a square from which it attacks the starting square. Such a tour is described as closed. Otherwise the tour is open Many variations on this topic have been studied by mathematicians, including Euler, over the centuries using:
- differently sized boards
- two-player games based on this idea
- problems using slight variations on the way the knight moves.
The pattern made by a Knight's Tour has often been used as a literary constraint. The earliest instance of this is found in Rudrata's Kavyalankara written during the 9th century. (Wiki)
Obviously Alice through the looking glass is a fine example although I'm not sure if it would be under the rules of the knights tour. Alice is simply a chess game played out with narrative, I did recently recreate the game to see if it would work and it does. Another idea which I'm jelous of....And along the same lines as Alice, Italo Calvino The castle of crossed Destinies - My favourite of Calvinos (Apart from his short stories) Which is written using tarot cards. The narrator of the book is a traveler who arrives at an enchanted castle where all who enter are struck mute. After a silent dinner, the host spreads the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck on the table and the guests lay out cards as a means of relating their adventures and telling their life stories. The Tavern of Crossed Destinies is Part 2 of this book. The device is the same - mute travelers who tell their stories with tarot cards, this time using the Tarot de Marseilles by Grimaud. Instead of laying their cards out in rows, they arrange them in irregular blocks with much overlap from one story to the next. As you can see there is scope for this to be made into an interactive narrative or at least use the idea of the cards - tarot or not tarot. Amazing.
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