Ostomachion (after Suter)Ostomachion (after Suter): square reformed with some pieces turned over Ostomachion figures mentioned by Ausonius and others (Bibliotheca Augustana)
The wordOstomachion (Ὀστομάχιον)[2] comes from Greek ὀστέον (osteon)'bone' and μάχη (mache)'fight, battle, combat'.[3][4] The manuscripts refer to the word as "Stomachion", an apparent corruption of the original Greek.Ausonius gives us the correct name "Ostomachion" (quod Graeci ostomachion vocavere, "which the Greeks called ostomachion").
TheOstomachion which he describes was a puzzle similar totangrams and was played perhaps by several persons with pieces made of bone.[5] It is not known which is older, Archimedes' geometrical investigation of the figure, or the game.Victorinus,[6]Bassus,[7]Ennodius[8] andLucretius[9] have also discussed the game.
The game is a 14-piecedissection puzzle forming a square. One form of play to which classical texts attest is the creation of different objects, animals, plants etc. by rearranging the pieces: an elephant, a tree, a barking dog, a ship, a sword, a tower etc. Another suggestion is that it exercised and developed memory skills in the young. James Gow, in hisShort History of Greek Mathematics (1884), footnotes that the purpose was to put the pieces back in their box,[10] and this was also a view expressed by W. W. Rouse Ball in some intermediate editions ofMathematical Essays and Recreations.[11]
A reconstruction of Archimedes' ostomachion in Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, Athens.
The number of different ways to arrange the parts of the Ostomachion within a square were determined to be 17,152 byFan Chung,Persi Diaconis,Susan P. Holmes, andRonald Graham, and confirmed by a computer search by William H. Cutler.[12]However, this count has been disputed because surviving images of the puzzle show it in a rectangle, not a square, and rotations or reflections of pieces may not have been allowed.[13]
