If a game is anything, it’s a set of rules. And playing a game requires following these rules. If we take this definition seriously, then a cheater, one who breaks the rules, not only doesn’t deserve to win — he literally isn’t playing the game. University of Waterloo philosopher Bernard Suits writes:

The end in poker is not to gain money, nor in golf simply to get a ball into a hole, but to do these things in prescribed (or, perhaps more accurately, not to do them in proscribed) ways: that is, to do them only in accordance with rules. Rules in games thus seem to be in some sense inseparable from ends. … If the rules are broken, the original end becomes impossible of attainment, since one cannot (really) win the game unless he plays it, and one cannot (really) play the game unless he obeys the rules of the game.

So, strictly speaking, it’s impossible for a cheater to win a game — he can win only by following the rules. “In a game I cannot disjoin the end, winning, from the rules in terms of which winning possesses its meaning. I of course can decide to cheat in order to gain the pot, but then I have changed my end from winning a game to gaining money.”

(Bernard Suits, “What Is a Game?”, Philosophy of Science 34:2 [June 1967], 148-156.)

“Such a question as, Why does everything in Spain look Spanish? is one of those apparently idiotic questions that opens up quite unexpected areas of vision.” — Northrop Frye, “Spirit and Symbol,” Words With Power, 2008

Where is a sound? If I play a note at the piano, you and I both seem to locate it at the instrument. But we both also know that we perceive the note because the piano sends waves through the air that strike our ears. That would mean that most of our auditory perception is illusion. Is that what we want to say?

Philosopher George Berkeley wrote, “When I hear a coach drive along the streets, immediately I perceive only the sound, but from experience I have had that such a sound is connected with a coach, I am said to hear the coach.” Perhaps the sound lies at our ears, or at our sensation of it, and it’s only our experience of the world that leads us to attribute it to some remote source. But that raises problems of its own. If sound is sensation, then can a sound occur if no one is present to hear it?

Perhaps the answer lies in between: Acoustics tells us that sounds are vibrations transmitted by the air. But vibrations of very high or low pitch aren’t perceptible to human ears. Are these still sounds?

A similar puzzle concerns smells.

Just an oddity — in Nature, June 5, 1919, Cambridge zoologist John Stanley Gardiner notes that a Fiji harbormaster had informed him of a saltwater crocodile that had landed alive on Rotuma, 260 miles to the north and 600 miles east of the New Hebrides.

“It certainly did not come from Fiji or any lands to the east, as crocodiles do not now exist on them,” Gardiner wrote. “It must indeed have crossed from the west, and covered at least 600 miles of open, landless sea.

“This occurrence is sufficiently remarkable to be placed on permanent record.”