AI helps archaeologists solve Roman gaming mystery

An old piece of limestone flattened and etched with crisscross grooves looks like a game board, but for nearly a century, no one knew how the game was played. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to reverse engineer the rules, revealing that the board was likely part of a “blocking” game played by the Romans.

The innovative approach to solving the game problem has allowed virtual game players to navigate over 100 possible rule sets. The researchers’ goal was to determine which set of rules best created the wear patterns on the limestone, Leiden University archaeologist Walter Crist and colleagues report in the February report. Antiquity.

Archaeologist Véronique Dasen of Switzerland’s University of Friborg called the study “groundbreaking” and added that the technique could be used to investigate other “lost” games. “The research results invite [archaeologists] reconsider the identification of Roman-era graffiti that could be real boards for a similar game not present in the texts,” she says.

The board, just 20 centimeters in diameter, was found in the Dutch town of Heerlen and displayed in a local museum. Heerlen sits atop the ruins of the Roman town of Coriovallum. The archaeological context of the board is unknown and there is no trace of such a game dating from Roman times, which lasted until the 5th century in this region.

Given the size of the board, the game probably only had two players. Researchers used A.I. The players game system allowing two virtual players to be pitted against each other in thousands of possible games, derived in part from the known rules of later games. The players uses a specialized “game description language” to control its virtual players; in this case, the games were designed to test different configurations of pieces and moves so that researchers could determine which rules might have produced the wear patterns.

“We tried many types of combinations: three versus two pieces, or four versus two, or two versus two… we wanted to test which ones replicated the wear and tear of the board,” Crist explains. The game, called Ludus Coriovallior the “Coriovallum Game”, can now be played online against a computer.

The result suggests that, on limestone at least, a player took turns placing four pieces in the grooves against an opponent’s two. The winner was the player who avoided being blocked the longest.

Blocking games like this weren’t thought to exist in Europe before the Middle Ages, Crist says. Go and Dominoes are modern blocking games, but Ludus Coriovalli doesn’t look like any of those.

Some gaming archaeologists say this study marks the start of a major breakthrough. “If more was known about the context of the board and potential game pieces, more interpretations could be made about how it functioned in past social life,” says Jacqueline Meier, an anthropologist at the University of North Florida, who was not involved in the research.

Dasen was also not involved but led the Place of play project to study ancient Roman and Greek board games and other forms of play. She says blocking games were once popular in Europe, and their names in several languages ​​indicate they were often compared to hunting. But until now, there was no evidence that the Romans knew this type of game, she said. “Games can last for centuries, and sometimes they appear and then disappear. »