Carre Arabe Color 11 Hc

Carre Arabe Color 1.1 is a HyperCard stack by Cyril Moulard (bill@quadra220.humana.univ-nantes.fr) that explores the classical Arabic magic square, a grid of numbers in which every row, column, and diagonal sums to the same total. Posted to Info-Mac in November 1994, it brings color presentation to a centuries-old recreational mathematics puzzle.

What it is

The stack lets the user examine and manipulate magic squares of the type long studied in Arabic mathematics, where the arrangement of integers produces identical sums along every line of the grid. It is part puzzle, part demonstration of the underlying number theory.

HyperCard implementation

The title is delivered as a HyperCard stack rather than a standalone application, so it requires HyperCard or HyperCard Player on the host Mac. The 1.1 release adds color support, which on early-1990s HyperCard typically meant the use of the ColorTools or AddColor XCMDs to overlay tinted artwork on the otherwise black-and-white card.

Origin

The stack was contributed by Cyril Moulard from a Quadra 220 at the Universite de Nantes humanities lab and uploaded to Info-Mac on 22 November 1994 as carre-arabe-color-11-hc.hqx, where it was filed under the board-game directory of the game tree.