7/13/2026 at 6:47:05 PM
> No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025).> Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics....
> Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations.
I would say this is more "inspired by" Ancient Rome.
by palmotea
7/13/2026 at 9:24:01 PM
> No written rules for this game survived antiquity… a comprehensive digital platform… that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games.Model and simulate based on what?
> Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria.
So their idea was to generate candidate rulesets, have AI try to figure out rational play, then see which pieces would be moved most often and match that to the forensic evidence?
by zahlman
7/14/2026 at 7:05:21 AM
The thing missing here is that nearly all of the games that use these nodes + stones are a variant on Nine Men's Morris (or Twelve Men's Morris, or etc). Discovering the ruleset for a particular variant is kind of like discovering a new version of "Uno" based on uncovering new house rules.Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.
by legitster
7/13/2026 at 7:44:48 PM
This feels like the thing that makes me deeply skeptical of swaths of archaeology and palaeontology as a science rather than being a kind of fandom.I imagine the incentives of having a crisp story for media consumption don’t help. I’d hope to read a lot more: “we’re missing the majority of the pieces to this puzzle. This represents our best guess given current evidence and methods.”
by Waterluvian
7/13/2026 at 8:02:47 PM
Archaeology is an unusual discipline in that it incorporates so many others as tools. Chemistry, physics, geology, CPSC, you name it. It's difficult enough to figure out what people were doing based on ruins and trash pits. It's harder still when there are so many disciplines involved that, each, introduce their own uncertainties.That being said, "We asked an AI..." is a special kind of uncertainty that goes above and beyond anything else Archaeologists do.
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"No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025).
Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics.
These statistics were then compared to the physical wear patterns on Object 04433. To account for human cognitive biases — such as right-handed players preferring to play on the right side of the board — the researchers applied symmetry transformations to the simulation results, maximising consistency between AI-generated play and the actual marks left by ancient players.
Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations."
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It's interesting that they considered use-wear on found pieces as input for their AI. Still, this study made a lot of assumptions. I wouldn't be surprised if a different team could use the same methods and come up with a completely different result.
by beloch
7/14/2026 at 5:27:56 PM
Their AI is "alpha-beta search agents" which, unless that's a very misleading description, sounds like a bunch of instances of minimax with alpha-beta pruning [1]. Which indeed should be the simplest, cheapest and most sensible option for that kind of game. I mean, no need to run an LLM/ agent harness on such a simple board game, that'd be overkill. And, well, tbh, it wouldn't work as well.So they could have used wear patterns as a component in an evaluation function used in minimax but I get the feeling they most likely did a wear analysis afterwards to weed out some of the possible rulesets indicated by the minimax play patterns.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning
by YeGoblynQueenne
7/13/2026 at 8:08:24 PM
I think the study would be more palatable if it was presented as an exploration of AI-aided methods and very strongly impressed that any one result was not the point.by Waterluvian
7/14/2026 at 9:25:19 AM
There's a huge difference between "asking and AI" meaning a prompt to a LLM, and very particular simulation fine tuned to this problem where the evaluation criteria is matching the exact wear found in the real boards. This work is much closer to a numerical simulation than anything you can call AI.by Shorel
7/14/2026 at 11:39:23 AM
The wear on the pieces and board was not an input for the AI tool they used.Also, they didn’t “ask” an AI anything, as it was not a natural language AI tool.
by falseprofit
7/13/2026 at 8:45:07 PM
The actual paper is written by archaeologists for archaeologists - just like all papers are written by people in a feild for people in a field.Your complaint is like complaining that a CS paper doesn't even mention that P = NP is still unknown, and that it just assumes that the best sorting methods are O(n log n). Some things are considered general knowledge in a field, and in archaeology one of those things is: all of this is a best guess given current evidence and methods.
The whole paper is full of citations to other work, which is full of citations to other work - all this work linked includes detailed reports of what was found where and what-else was there, people who do statistical analyisis of similar findings, people who ask questions like "what explanations can there be for it?", more importantly "what else would we find if X was true, if Y was true?". When new evidence arrives, people can and do go back and re-examine these things. Your random skepticism and all the questions you may ask have already been asked and addressed, and frankly: these archaeologist's conclusions carry far far far more believable weight than your half-assed skepticism.
by sophacles
7/14/2026 at 9:18:36 AM
True, this is the best we can get and archaeology is full of speculation. It is still a very, very reasonable speculation, probably 95% accurate. You can thank the ones who burned the Biblioteca of Alexandria for most of the loss of actual information.by Shorel
7/14/2026 at 12:05:37 AM
What about reading the paper before you proclaim all archeology rotten over the wording in a wikipedia article?by tokai
7/14/2026 at 12:00:32 PM
New here? This is the best place to find Dunning Kruger in the wild!by 4ndrewl
7/13/2026 at 7:48:50 PM
I have often wondered how to make this clear wrt science communicationEg much is not known about dinosaurs. Many things cannot be found in fossils (obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1747/)
How do you communicate what is unknown or what can't be known?
by wrsh07
7/13/2026 at 8:35:41 PM
My favorite dinosaur theory is they looked far more like a plump turkey than a Komodo dragon.We tend to just drape a bounding skin volume over the bones and give it a color, MAYBE some feathers.
But a whale skeleton looks nothing like the mass of flesh of a whale. Skeletons give no clue about an Elephant’s head shape.
So imagine a huge fluffy owl or yellow chick with a trex skeleton deep inside.
by kridsdale1
7/13/2026 at 9:37:17 PM
This seems impossible. If you started with chess pieces and a chessboard or even a go board and go pieces, it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct the game as they’re currently played.by dyauspitr
7/14/2026 at 6:15:53 AM
Whichis is fair and good, bc nobody would expect you to rebuild the actual rules of chess from the board alone.However it would still be useful if archeologists used the board to figure out some games similar to checkers, or go; or if they also have the pieces they could guess it was a combat game like Shogi. Any of those would give you insight about the kinds of leisure that people may get from that board.
by TuringTest