MOST COMPLEX PROBLEMS DO HAVE A SOLUTION
Many years ago in a small Indian village; a farmer had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to a village moneylender. The moneylender, who was old and ugly, fancied the farmer's beautiful daughter. So he proposed a bargain. He said he would forgo the farmer's debt if he could marry his daughter. Both the farmer and his daughter were horrified by the proposal. So the cunning money-lender suggested that they let providence decide the matter. He told them that he would put a black pebble and a white pebble into an empty money bag.
Then the girl would have to pick one pebble from the bag.
1) If she picked the black pebble, she would become his wife and her father's debt would be forgiven.
2) If she picked the white pebble she need not marry him and her father's debt would still be forgiven.
3) But if she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into jail.
They were standing on a pebble strewn path in the farmer's field. As they talked, the moneylender bent over to pick up two pebbles. As he picked them up, the sharp-eyed girl noticed that he had picked up two black pebbles and put them into the bag. He then asked the girl to pick a pebble from the bag. Now, imagine that you were standing in the field. What would you have done if you were the girl? If you had to advise her, what would you have told her?
Careful analysis would produce three possibilities:
1. The girl should refuse to take a pebble.
2. The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the bag and expose the money-lender as a cheat.
3. The girl should pick a black pebble and sacrifice herself in order to save her father from his debt and imprisonment.
Take a moment to ponder over the story. The above story is used with the hope that it will make us appreciate the difference between lateral and logical thinking. The girl's dilemma cannot be solved with traditional logical thinking. Think of the consequences if she chooses the above logical answers.
What would you recommend to the Girl to do?
Scroll down if you give up...............
Well, here is what she did....
The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles. "Oh, how clumsy of me," she said. "But never mind, if you look into the bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked." Since the remaining pebble is black, it must be assumed that she had picked the white one. And since the money-lender dared not admit his dishonesty, the girl changed what seemed an impossible situation into an extremely advantageous one.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
Most complex problems do have a solution. It is only that we don't attempt to think.
English playing-cards are known and used all over the world - everywhere where Bridge and Poker are played. In England, the same pack is used for other games such as Whist, Cribbage, Rummy, Nap and so on. But in other European countries games such as Skat, Jass, Mus, Scopa, and Tarock are played, using cards of totally different face-designs many of them with roots far older than English cards. The history of these national and regional patterns has only recently become the concern of students and collectors. 
The earliest authentic references to playing-cards in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins - which Mah Jong players know as circles and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as (non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants - knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens - nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs. 
In Germany and Switzerland, the two lower court cards are both on foot, representing an 'upper' and a 'lower' rank-as stated in the 1377 description of playing-cards. Switzerland also preserves another feature of early German cards. The tens are represented by a banner, showing just one suit-symbol-though many old German banners show ten symbols. In these countries also, the 52-card pack was shortened to 48 cards by dropping the Aces. The deuce, or Daus, was then promoted to being the top card, and nowadays often carries the letter A as if it were an ace. The pack was then shortened even further. German single-figure packs habitually carried delightful vignettes of genre scenes at the base of the numeral cards-usually lost when packs became double-ended. 
The study of the development of playing-cards has further been bedevilled by overmuch attention to tarot packs. To the best of our knowledge, the first packs of cards in Europe comprised 52 cards in four Italian-type suits each with three court cards (king, knight, and foot-servant), and were used for games of skill involving trick-taking, as well as for gambling games, which were often prohibited. Very soon, the idea of adding extra cards to act as permanent trumps came into being, and the tarot pack was born. At the same time a queen was interpolated between the king and the knight, so that, with the extra 22 non-suited cards, a pack of 78 cards was created. Such packs have continued to be used for their original purpose right through to the present day. 
It is the choice of subjects for the trump cards which has been the focus for so much attention by both scholars and occultists. Though playing-card historians still do not have a satisfactory explanation of the sequence of subjects, many of the occultist theories have been discredited. For instance, the tarot pack was known in Europe in the early 15th century, before the arrival of the gypsies. This rules out the proposed connection with Egypt first put forward in 1781, which forms the foundation for much of the later occult speculation. The earliest known use of Tarot packs for fortune telling was in Bologna, around 1750, using an entirely different system of meanings, and the use of ordinary packs of playing-cards for cartomancy does not date from much earlier than this. Unfortunately, some occultists and cartomanciers continue to ignore these facts. 
The use of pictures on tarot trumps was eventually copied in a modern development of the older idea of 'pictured' cards. (Indeed, a couple of tarot packs actually started life as normal packs of cards with pictures instead of pips on the numeral cards.) The success of this idea was dependent on the introduction of corner-indices-an American innovation which was surprisingly late in being introduced in view of much earlier experiments in that field. In America, around the turn of the century it was exploited in order to turn photographs of scenery into souvenir packs intended to promote the joys of rail travel. And such packs were further distinguished by colourful pictorial designs on the backs of the cards-which have lately become collected for their own sake. Many modern packs of cards use a similar format to carry 52 different pictures of all kind of subjects: animals and birds, views, works of art, cartoons, pin-ups, trains, planes, etc. 
The resulting cards were, of course, totally unusable for play when they had no corner-indices, and indeed the publishers of early packs recommended that the blank backs should be used as visiting cards (a very important item in high society). Nevertheless, almost from the beginning, court cards were also provided so as to complete the pack. In Europe these were drawn from literary sources, though in England a more humorous approach prevailed. It is probable that such ideas helped to propel a tendency for playing-cards to keep up with current fashions and trends. Even the more run-of-the-mill continental cards tended to have elegantly clad and fashionably coiffured ladies instead of crowned queens. 
The fashion was very slow to catch on in England. Despite a few experiments, mostly not very attractive, it was only with the use of chromolithography towards the end of the century that artistic packs became viable. But English card-players had a reputation for conservatism anyway-witness their great reluctance to change from single-figure court cards to double-ended ones-and even then the numeral cards were slow to follow suit. The usefulness of corner-indices seems to have been appreciated more quickly, however. 
English card-players also clung to the traditional, but frankly ugly, designs of their court cards, which had remained virtually unchanged since before 1700. Prior to that era, we have scanty information about the designs of everyday cards, since few of them have survived. An English educational pack of 'Memory cards' of c.1605 includes copies of elegant court cards made in Rouen, where cards of a particular design were made especially for export to England. Study of these cards goes far to explain peculiar features of later English-made versions. The crudity of these copies was due to inept English block-cutters trying, with home-made products, to compensate for the effect of the 1628 ban on importation of foreign cards. In fact, the accidental stylisation has proved to be a functional factor of stabilising influence in ensuring the durability of these designs. Most modern English-style cards still betray signs of their ancestry. 
It was on 22nd October 1628 that Charles I granted the charter to the Company of the Mistery of Makers of Playing Cards of the City of London, and from 1st December that year all future importation of playing cards was forbidden. In return, a duty on playing-cards was demanded, and the subsequent history of attempts to extract that duty makes an unedifying and contradictory story, as any student of such matters knows. The Livery Company still exists, and, despite the almost total cessation of production of playing-cards in Britain, flourishes. In 1994 it achieved its highest ambition in the City of London, when a former Master of the Company, Alderman Christopher Walford, became Lord Mayor. Towards the end of his term of office, he opened an exhibition of playing-cards in the Print Room at Guildhall Library, which houses a collection of historic playing-cards belonging to the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, the nucleus of which was donated by the 'Father of the Company' Mr Henry Druitt Phillips, in 1907. 
In parts of India, games are played with packs of circular cards with eight, ten or more suits, whose designs reflect either the departmental structure of an Indian rajah's court or the incarnations of Vishnu (or other more complex systems), and are played something like Whist with no trumps but with extra complications. Earlier this century, it was claimed that there was a connection between the four-suited European pack and the four-handed game of chess played in India, but this theory has now been discredited in the light of the connection with the Islamic world.
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