At 10:08 -0600 2006-12-08, Timothy Hunt wrote:
An interesting question came up recently about Zendo. It says in the rule book that a Rule cannot refer to anything outside the Koan in space or time. Clearly, Koans can refer to colour, which is an inherent property of the pieces. However, a Rule that was suggested was A Koan has the buddha nature, if and only if it contains a stack whose total pip value is the same as the number of letters in the colour of the top-most pyramid in that stack. Now, I would argue that that's NOT allowed by the rule, as it's language dependent, and thus refers to something outside of the Koan - i.e. language. "Red" is an inherent property. "R-E-D" is not, for it would be different for French players: "R-O-U-G-E".
So, the rule could refer to "the English name of the color" or just have an explicit "3 if red, 4 if blue, 5 if green, 6 if yellow".
-- Daniel W. Johnson panoptes@xxxxxxxxxx http://members.iquest.net/~panoptes/ 039 53 36 N / 086 11 55 W