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Ashta’s chess tales

കുതിരയായിരുന്ന കവിത

Kashmir, about 1,100 years ago · 2 minute read

ഒരു കവി ഒരു ശ്ലോകത്തിനുള്ളിൽ കുതിരയുടെ യാത്ര ഒളിപ്പിച്ചു — നമുക്കറിയാവുന്നതിൽ ഏറ്റവും പഴയത് അതാണ്.

A poet called Rudrata lived in Kashmir more than a thousand years ago. He was writing a handbook on the art of making verse, full of clever tricks a poet could play with words.

One of his tricks has never been bettered. He drew half a chessboard — four rows, eight columns — and laid a verse across it, one syllable to a square. Read the syllables the ordinary way, left to right, and you have a poem.

Now put a horse on the first square and hop it about the half-board the way a chess knight moves, never landing on the same square twice. Read the syllables in the order the horse lands on them — and you get the verse again. The poem and the ride fit each other perfectly.

This is the earliest knight’s tour anyone has traced, and it was made by a poet, not a mathematician. Nine hundred years later the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler studied the same puzzle with numbers.

Nobody knows which Rudrata found first — the words or the ride. Perhaps it does not matter. He saw that a pattern on a chessboard and a pattern in language could be the same pattern.