I was curious to learn more about how they discovered and reconstructed the rules. They explain that at: https://ludus-coriovalli.web.app/about
Ancient Roman Board Game
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Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#12> 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…
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.”
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.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
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 a…
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.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#14Too assymetric IMO. I have no problems winning with hounds even on hard, but I have no chance of winning except against easy.
Ancient example of an unbalanced meta. Maybe we are missing some of the patch notes for balance changes
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
I have often wondered how to make this clear wrt science communication Eg 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?
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.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#16Reminds me of the mystery of the Roman dodecahedrons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
I was thinking of them yesterday because I noticed one for sale in the antiquities shop in Andor, which brought up all sorts of Earth/Rome/Star Wars cannon questions.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#17Too assymetric IMO. I have no problems winning with hounds even on hard, but I have no chance of winning except against easy.
Ancient example of an unbalanced meta. Maybe we are missing some of the patch notes for balance changes
Maybe the concept of desiring balance is modern. Maybe they wanted to encode asymmetry in the game to mirror nature, or the Master / Slave dynamic which they likely considered to be a natural law.
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#18Another ancient board game to be decoded is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur . This is from 2600BC so is older to Christ than Christ is to us. The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!
You mean Irving Finkel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Finkel
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#19It should be "novus ludus" not "nova ludus". (now go and write 100 times...)
Re: Ancient Roman Board Game
#20> 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…
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.”
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.