History of statistics - an Historical Epic - Mahabharata

In my last post i had mentioned how statistics was used in a kingdom, how they manipulated the height of the ladder. Now i tried to get more deeper about its progress of development. 

It was so fascinating for me to learn that Probability was used in Indian epic Mahabharata. I never meant to say , they actually know the phrase of proabbility and its methodology at that time. However, when we deal with the current situation its a kind of estimation to draw inference. Before i go in detail let me say whom i am going to talk about, it is about King Rituparna and Nala. 

King Rituparna was the king of Ayodhya. He is the son of Sarvakama. In the service of Sarvakama, Nala entered after he had lost his kingdom. Rituparna was brilliant in playing dice. Later Nala became the charioteer to Rituparna.  Rituparna determined to be present at the second Swayamvara of Damayanti, but could only be so by the help of his charioteer Vahuka. Vahuka was talented in horsemanship and this enabled Rituparna to drive from Ayodhya to Vidarbha in one day. Nala was disguised as Vahuka, agreed to impart to Rituparna his knowledge of horsemanship in return for that monarch's skill in dice. They made the exchange, and arriving at Ayodhya, Nala appeared in his original form and was restored to his wife. Returning with her to Nishadha he sought Pushkara, renewed the game and won back his kingdom. This is an gist about King Rituparna whom i am going to talk in detail about statistics prevailed from ancient times.

Now back to our statistics, Nala asked King Rituparna to teach his numerical skills. King points out at a tree and asks Nala to estimate number of leaves and fruits in the tree. The main point which he highlighted was " not to count". Now wonder , how he might have estimated the number of leaves and fruits in the tree without merely counting it. This sounds very interesting how he could have answered such a kind of question . Let me proceed further to give you what was his answer. please do not ask me how he told the answer.

It is so astonishing that this skill is imparted to Nala who was clearly seeking knowledge about how to gamble. This sort of estimation or arriving at a conclusion is usually a problem in statistical estimation and has explicit connections with probability. I am not sure whether our ancient people knew everything about probability- but it makes me to feel that they may have understood that about permutations , combinations and probability which they might have  used to study gambling systems. 

According to history, King Rituparna estimated so accurate(as per history). It is mentioned in Nalopakhyanam, number of leaves was estimated as 50 million and fruits to be 2095. 

Is this belongs to large sample estimation theory? or did he use any sort of sampling methodology? This makes us to think that they have a very clear understanding of probabiltiy theory or combination mathematics or gambling techniques without knowing the name of it which we use in recent times. I am not sure about the answer which he mentioned is correct or false. But this may not be important question for this blog but the one which needs to be highlighted us and makes us think about significance of estimations and finding an answer. 

Let me discuss much more in detail about statistics and its development in further post.