The game is a 14-piece
dissection puzzle forming a square. One form of play to which classical texts attest is the creation of different objects, animals, plants etc. by rearranging the pieces: an elephant, a tree, a barking dog, a ship, a sword, a tower etc. Another suggestion is that it exercised and developed memory skills in the young. James Gow, in his
Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884), footnotes that the purpose was to put the pieces back in their box, and this was also a view expressed by W. W. Rouse Ball in some intermediate editions of
Mathematical Essays and Recreations. The number of different ways to arrange the parts of the Ostomachion within a square were determined to be 17,152 by
Fan Chung,
Persi Diaconis,
Susan P. Holmes, and
Ronald Graham, and confirmed by a computer search by William H. Cutler. However, this count has been disputed because surviving images of the puzzle show it in a rectangle, not a square, and rotations or reflections of pieces may not have been allowed. ==References==