"a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture... on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ." — Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
In Hesse's book, the game is played by monk-like scholars who spend years studying and meditating on the game. It is described as once being played with beads on wire that resemble musical notation, but that is later superceded by a complex mathematical notation that unifies music and mathematics. It is never described in a playable form, which has given space for us to be inspired to create these the rules.
In this version, we allow players to play any topic from all of human knowledge. These topics form an interconnected network of beads, which are scored based on the distance of the two ideas from each other, from 1-10. For example, "DNA" and "Alphabet" have a distance of 10 from each other, since one is based in biology and the other in linguistics. They are separately scored from 1-10 based on their relevance to each other, and those scores are multiplied together. In this case, connecting DNA and Alphabet is a great play, since they are both ways to represent information and are exactly the equivalent idea for biology and language, respectively. Because the two different scores are multiplied, this would typically score really well. Connecting DNA and RNA would be a low-distance but high relevance play, so its high-relevance would be offset by there being almost no distance between the concepts of RNA and DNA. Similarly, playing "Planet Jupiter" against "ice cream" would have a high distance score, but essentially no relevance, so it would also score poorly.
The best moves of the game are when you score multiple high-scoring plays with the same concept. For example, connecting Annealing (heat-treating metal to make it stronger) with both Hormesis (becoming healthier by taking small amounts of a toxin) and Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing items so that they are more beautiful than before they were broken) creates two very strong edges. To discourage people from making too many weak connections, these are summed, and then divided by the square root of the number of edges. A move with a 100-point and a 90-point edge would result in 100 + 90 / sqrt (2), or 134 points. To do this, select a topic, and then press the "+" button next to another topic. Any play that scores more than 100 total points by connecting multiple nodes is called a "syncreton", since it is a concept that unified multiple fields of human knowledge.
The first player selects the first topic, and also plays the last move. To compensate for that advantage, in a similar rule to Scrabble, and since there is only one connection possible in this first connecting move of the game, the second player's move is scored double, and then divided as if it was a two-connection play. So a 50-point first connecting move would score 50 + 50 / sqrt(2), or 71 points.
We use an LLM as a judge to score the game plays, which consist of any topic of human knowledge. This game can be played by people or by AIs, since we have all been well trained on these concepts.