Above: Chess Set by Josef Hartwig (German, 1880-1955) from MoMA.
Linked by Air, designers of the wonderful new Whitney.org, share some of their class syllabi, including a chess-visualization assignment that’s after Duchamp’s, Hartwig’s, and my own heart.
Note to self: add these guys to the list of people I’ll never play a game of HORSE with.
Above: Spinning DNA into GOD with seven moves.
Doublets, or Word Ladders, is a game invented by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll for “two little girls who found nothing to do” on Christmas Day 1877, though there is some evidence that writers played with the form during Luther’s Protestant Reformation or perhaps even earlier in the Odyssey. Carroll originally called the the game “word-links,” but by 1879 he had published enough of the puzzles in Vanity Fair magazine to merit a collection by Macmillan titled “Doublets: a word puzzle,” a reference to the witches’ incatation in Macbeth, “Double, double, toil, and trouble.” The name stuck, and the game was an immediate and runaway hit.
The rules are simple: change one word into another by altering a single letter, which counts for a step. Each step needs to read as a word, and the start and end words are often related in some poetic way. Carroll’s explanatory example involved changing HEAD to TAIL in five moves: HEAD / HEAL / TEAL / TELL / TALL / TAIL. Other popular doublets include making a DOOR LOCK, obtaining a LOAN from a BANK, and turning WHEAT into BREAD (more here and here). Later, other gamers followed in Carroll’s footsteps, adding rules for Studdlets, Splices, Splits, and Splinters (see David Miller’s excellent “Word Games for Formal Logic,” here).
In this 1996 article from The Mathematical Gazette, magician, math writer, and Carroll scholar Martin Gardner writes of Stanford computer scientist (and TeX inventor) Donald Knuth’s experiments with using computers to solve doublet puzzles:
[Knuth] constructed a graph on which 5,757 of the most common five-letter English words (proper nouns excluded) are represented by points, each joined by a line to every word to which it can be changed by altering just one letter. The graph has 14,135 lines. […] Most pairs of five-letter words on Knuth’s list can be joined by ladders. Some—Knuth calls them ALOOF words because one of them is “aloof”—have no neighbors. The graph has 671 ALOOF words, such as EARTH, OCEAN, BELOW, SUGAR, LAUGH, FIRST, THIRD, NINTH. Two words, BARES and CORES, are connected to 25 other words; none to a higher number. There are 103 word pairs with no neighbors except each other, such as ODIUM-OPIUM and MONAD-GONAD. Knuth’s 1992 Christmas card featured the smallest ladder (11 steps) that changes SWORD to PEACE by using only words found in the Bible’s Revised Standard Version.
“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE … SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 … Humans have 23 years to go … Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens. PALO ALTO, CA: Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the ‘survival horizon’ for Homo sapiens—the human race—from ‘indefinite’ to 23 years.” So begins The Institute for the Future’s game Superstruct, with a press release 11 years in the future.
Conway’s Game of Life: 1) Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness. 2) Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding. 3) Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation. 4) Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.
