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"Dicing and Divination in Early China"

pocossin

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liubo

The third picture shows the rather large throwing sticks.

Another, somewhat later source, The Family Instructions of Master Yan by Yan Zhitui (531–591) states that there were two variants of Liubo, "Greater Bo" (大博) which was played with six throwing sticks, and "Lesser Bo" (小博) which was played with two dice.

How could throwing sticks determine a move? There is no mention of numbers or symbols on the sides of the sticks.
 

charly

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liubo

The third picture shows the rather large throwing sticks.
How could throwing sticks determine a move? There is no mention of numbers or symbols on the sides of the sticks.
Hi, Tom:

Each stick is a half rod of bamboo cut along, each is two-sided, being one side convex, yang of course, and the other concave, yin.

Throwing the six sticks is equivalent to throwing six coins. If the sticks have fixed places [or are thrown orderly] the result is a binary number for cero [000000 = 0+0+0+0+0+0] to 63 [111111 = 1+2+4+8+16+32]. If they have no fixed place the sum goes from cero to six, say a range of 7 instead of 64.

I go to look at my notes, meanwhile maybe this document might be useful:

http://history.chess.free.fr/papers/Zeng 1999.pdf

Yours,

Charly
 

meerkats64

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Numbers never lie or decieve that is why they cannot be ignored in divination/fortunetelling yet its bizarre that eg politicians get their sums wrong when they screwing up or ballsing up economies but they get their sums correct when they banking their expenses and fattening their bank account balances!
 

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