Origin of chess - a phylogenetic perspective

Abstract

Board games are like plant and animal species in that they can can evolve and give riseto new forms. This leads to an important similarity between board games and bio-logical species (Eagle 1995, 1998; Kraaijeveld 1999): in both cases a group of simi-lar-looking ‘species ’ most likely owe their similarity to their being descended from a single common ancestor. Obviously, board games can also go extinct and they even have their ‘fos-sils’: games that are not played anymore today, but are known (completely or partly) from historical sources. The Egyptian games of Tau and Senet, the Chinese Liubo and the lar-ger Shogi (Japanese chess) variants are just a few examples of such fossils and Tai-Kyoku Shogi, with a board of 36x36 squares and more than 400 pieces per side (Umebayashi 1997), can be considered the board games equivalent of a brontosaurus fossil. A field of biology, called phylogeny, uses a range of analytical methods in recons-tructing the evolution of groups of plants or animals. These phylogenetic techniques are widely accepted tools in evolutionary biology (with a vast body of literature; see Kitching et al (1998) for an excellent introduction to the subject) and have also been succesfully used in research into the evolution of languages (Ruhlen 1987). Phylogenetic analyses are based on two important concepts. First of all, characters of a species can occur in one of two states: primitive or derived (the technical terms are plesiomorphic and apomor-

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