Please use the following form to make your entry of an ISBN wrestler to challenge the current winner. The entry must be of an existing book. Every item in the form must be filled. The ISBN must be a sequence of 10 digits separated into four parts by hyphens.

ISBN (Internet Sumo for BitNiks) is a game in which an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is given a brand new meaning: a description of a sumo wrestler.

Sumo is a Japanese traditional wrestling which have many fans all over the world. For those who are unfamiliar with sumo and its terminology, a good place to visit on the web is SumoWeb!. This site tells pretty much everything you need to enjoy watching sumo games.

As you may have noticed, every ISBN has four parts: the nation/language code, the publisher code, the book code and the check digit. Each part is interpreted in ISBN (the game) the following way:

Each is decoded into a natural number ranging from 0 to 255. We do not make the decoding algorithm public - it is for you to find out.

The game goes as follows:

• The player makes an entry of a new wrestler to challenge the current winner (defender) using the form. The challenger's rank at the time of entry is juryo.
• One of the four properties of the wrestlers - power, speed, technique or experience - is compared by the server and the new winner is decided. Which property is at stake for a match is decided by the characteristics of the wrestlers. The comparison is context-oriented, and wrestlers with high points do not always win. In fact, a wrestler with extremely high points tend to lose, so please watch out.
• Each time a wrestler wins, whose rank goes up as maegashira, komusubi, sekiwake, ozeki and finally, yokozuna.
• When a yokozuna loses, the wrestler retires, and whose profile is saved at the Hall of fame and remembered forever.

To put a link to ISBN on your site, please use the following URL:

Always under déconstruction

Copyright © Kenji Saito, 1996