What the game Nim was really meant to have been; finding a Nim with draw possibility

From: Archimedes Plutonium (a_plutonium_at_iw.net)
Date: 07/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:35:10 -0500

I am looking for a Nim variant that has a draw OS. I think I have to go
back to the creation origins of the game and I suspect the game may have
been created historically on these lines of behaviour. Chess,
historically was probably created on the lines of behaviour of playing
with toy soldiers and then one day including a checkered board as
position and then later as time passed making up rules as to how the
pieces can move and capture.

Historical Nim (conjecture by me): I am guessing that historically Nim
was sort of like a huge marketplace or barter between tribes where
hostilities could erupt. Or like Indian intertribal rituals occurred.
Say tribe A comes laden with lots of gifts of objects and dumps them
into a pile and tribe B has its pile of objects. And so what that two
tribes do is take some objects of pile A and some from pile B and form a
new pile of #1 and take some objects of pile A and some from pile B and
form another new pile of #2 and so on and so on until they have created
new piles numbering 1 through 5 with various amounts of objects in each
pile that belongs to tribe A and tribe B.

So the ceremony and festivities are partakion and now the highlight of
the meet is for the leader of tribe A and tribe B to play a sort of Nim
like game where they can say take some objects out of piles #1 through
#5.

This above is what I conjecture is the historical root of the game nim
just as the historical root (conjectural) of chess was a melding of toy
soldiers tied to a board and given rules of movement.

The reason I bring this up is because I believe it suggests what the
*draw* of Nim should be and what the flaw of the game in modern times
had corrupted into.

The draw would be to obviously take back all the objects that tribe A
initially contributed, likewise tribe B. That creates a draw inside the
game of Nim and suggests that a Nim OS of a draw exists. And it suggests
that to modify the modern game would have the two players come to the
game with equal numbers of matchsticks or objects and to place them into
piles, mixed piles. And the objects marked so as to know whether object
is from player A or player B. And a win in this Nim variant is the one
who has the most pieces at the end of the game.
A draw would occur if both players have the same amount.

Our modern game of Nim had digressed so far off its historical creation
that it is a somewhat meaningless game because it is a sure win in the
OS. Whereas the historical Nim probably had a role in commerce and trade
and the idea that after the trade the parties were happy with what they
selected out of the piles.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.archimedesplutonium.com
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

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