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Ancient Roman Board Game

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Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#51

Post by falseprofit »

beloch wrote: post #12
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

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.

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#52

Post by 4ndrewl »

tokai wrote: post #37
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.”

What about reading the paper before you proclaim all archeology rotten over the wording in a wikipedia article?

New here? This is the best place to find Dunning Kruger in the wild!

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#53

Post by goodmythical »

TobTobXX wrote: post #3

Too assymetric IMO. I have no problems winning with hounds even on hard, but I have no chance of winning except against easy.

I beat both on hard fairly easily? Came back to comments expecting remarks on the shape of the board allowing for fairly easy "I just move back an forth as a hare" and "I just wait for you to move wrong as a hound"

As hares, if you rush one of the middle nodes, the hound machine could capture, but it never figured out moving two hounds all the way over to do so in my play. As hounds, it's basically the same, you just make sure none of the hares ever get "behind" you because then it's a lot harder to contain them.

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#54

Post by mteoharov »

i think i broke the bot! i won on hard w the hares.

figured out that my hares needed to stay together in either the top or bottom center and left corners of the big square.

at one point the bot started wasting moves so i repeated mine until it ran out! not sure if I found the deterministic win of the game or it was a bug in the AI.

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#55

Post by Shorel »

dyauspitr wrote: post #28
wood_spirit wrote: post #6

Another 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!

> A partial description in cuneiform of the rules of the Game of Ur as played in the second century BC has been preserved on a Babylonian clay tablet written by the scribe Itti-Marduk-balāṭu. This is much more palatable and cool since they’re not just randomly guessing what the game can be like this article is

They are not randomly guessing, they are doing something more sofisticated: they are correlating gameplay with the evidence of board wear.

They are creating a probability distribution function where each point is a different gameplay ruleset and then we are free to pick the gameplay ruleset with the highest probability, with the caveat that there are other similar gameplays, with slightly different rules, and almost the same probability. And there are other gameplay rules with much lower probability because they don't match the wear of the board.

A random guess would have a flat distribution where any gameplay has the same probability.

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#56

Post by ortusdux »

rmunn wrote: post #44
ortusdux wrote: post #16

Reminds 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.

The best explanation anyone has come up with for those dodecahedrons was as tools for making jewelry from gold wire. Here's a video by an expert knitter named Amy Gaines in which she demonstrates the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADTLozKm0I The segment where she uses a replica dodecahedron to make a chain from aluminum wire (stiffer than gold, meaning this would have been easier with actual gold) is entir…

There is a decade old paper that compiled over 50 possible explanations, and many more have been hypthesized since. Some of the dodecahedrons are solid, which may negate many of the theorized uses.

https://www.academia.edu/26809664/The_enigma_of_the_dodecahe...

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#57

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

beloch wrote: post #12
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

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.

______________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning

Re: Ancient Roman Board Game

#58

Post by laszlojamf »

I really liked this game, but it frustrates me a little bit that there only seems to be one way to win. Or at least I've only found one. If I play the hardest AI, I can consistently win, with the right sequence, but it always ends up on the right side with the hares next to each other.

Is it like chess only way more obvious, that the first mover wins, and if so, wouldn't the Romans have figured it out?

Or am I just exploiting a weakness in the AI and a human would make better choices?

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