[Icehouse] Zendo rules question

[Daniel W. Johnson]

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 at iquest.net
http://members.iquest.net/~panoptes/
039 53 36 N / 086 11 55 W