Word: marienbad
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Last week the Marienbad game was popping up at cocktail parties (with colored toothpicks), on commuter trains (with paper matches), in offices (paper clips) and in bars (with swizzle sticks). Only two can play, but any number can kibitz-and everyone, it seems, has a system for duplicating "X's" talent for winning...
Actually the Marienbad match game is a variation of one of the most ancient of all two-person mathematical divertissements. Originating in China around 3000 B.C., it was given the name Nim by Harvard Mathematician Charles Leonard Bouton, who found, in 1901, that a strategy using move combinations based on binary numbers would make anyone a winner. All the successful player has to do is memorize them...
Early in the murky ravelings of the current movie Last Year at Marienbad (TIME, March 16) comes a scene in which the cadaverous "X" invites the importunate "M" to play a little game of matchsticks. With insouciant deliberation "X" lays out 16 matches in four rows on a table top-seven in the top row, five in the next, three next and one alone. He explains that they will take turns picking up the matches; each may take as few or as many as he wishes (even a whole row), but all must be taken from the same...
...based either on hunches or intuition. One nimble Nim player moves swiftly to reduce the rows of matches into either an odd number of rows each containing an unequal number of matches, or into an even number of rows each containing an equal number of matches. Says Bosley Crowther, Marienbad-applauding motion picture critic of the New York Times: "Once I get the other guy to make the first move, I remove even numbers of matches until he loses-almost always-unless he is playing the same rules." Winning the game is good for a free drink in most bars...
Last Year at Marienbad. Alain Resnais, the grand admiral of the French New Wave, has produced a movie that is anything but a movie: a metaphysical enigma, a Platonic allegory, a treatise on cubistic cinema that attempts an Einsteinian revolution in the art of film, a Rorschach blot into which the spectator can project whatever he pleases...