Ron's chess-playing skills (was Howgarts Clubs - Art, Music, and Chess).

[o_caipora]

No: HPFGUIDX 85750

Angel Moules wrote:

> I don't think that the chess is so bad, so much as 
> the fact that Ron had to take into consideration 
> that he had three humans on the board. That
> gives the game a different flavour. It's like saying there are three
> pieces you aren't allowed to lose.

Contrast with another author who wrote for children, Lewis 
Carrol. "Through the Looking Glass" is written as a chess game, and 
IIRC the moves all work.

Carrol also wrote on logic. His "Elementary Logic" uses some 
extremely funny examples. That's educationally useful: the point of 
logic is to separate the syntax (the form) from the semantics (the 
content). If you're trying to teach formal logic, you don't want 
students to think about the meaning, so you don't try to prove the 
existence of God, etc.

(It's kind of like using Lorem Ipsum in magazine layouts.)

Carrol's kind of logic, syllogisms, comes from Aristotle. It's 
obsolete, nowadays we use symbolic logic, which is more powerful.

Even so, Carrol's logic is enough to see that the potion problem 
lacks sufficient clues to solve. If Rowling were to write something 
like that again, an editor would surely catch it. But before Volume 1 
came out and caught on, she may not have merited that kind of review.

I think the failure to adequately describe the potion puzzle shows a 
genuine limitation on Rowling's part. It's a very simple problem. If 
the chess game, in the same part of the same book, seems to suffer 
from limitation, well then it's got company.

 - Caipora