History of Chess
Chess is originated in the Indian subcontinent in the 6th
century in Gupta Empire. It was early known as Chaturanga and Chatrang.
Chatrang became Shatranj when Muslims came in this area during the 7th century. The
game reached in Russia and Europe in the 9th century. European gave it the name
of Chess. Rules of the Chess was changed and developed various times until now
it has reached its current shape and rules.
In the past, chess was a part of the noble culture and known as
kings’ game. It was used to teach war strategy to princes and commanders.
Story of Chess
Here is also a very interesting story which is believed to be about the invention of Chess.
This game was developed by a mathematician of that time. He presented this game to the king. The King liked this game so much that he offered to the developer anything he wished for. The developer replied that he would like one grain of rice for the first square of the board, two grains for the second, four grains for the third and so on doubled for each of the 64 squares of the game board". The king was astonished why this poor man not asked for gold or silver coins? The King ordered to fulfill the request of the developer but soon it was revealed that it is not easy to fill these squares with rice grains as per the developer’s condition. In fact, the whole empire supply of rice was bushed before the 30th square was reached. It is actually impossible to fill all the squares of the chessboard with rice grains with this formula. The land never produced this much rice in a single time.
Can you guess how many rice grains (in numbers) and how much rice (in weight) would be the exact answer?
Nowadays, Chess is not only a game but it is also related
to several branches of mathematics. It also provided the basics of computer
science. Do you ever think why a byte is equal to 8 bits and not to 10 bits,
why a kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes and not to 1000 bytes? Because it is
based upon the structure of the chess game, there are 8 squares in a line and a
total of 8 lines. So the number of bytes in computer science also moved in 8s; 8,
16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024.
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| Story of Chess |