In the hands of a non-expert, the oval artwork looks like nothing else. However, the geometric patterns on one of its two wide sides, along with other clues, suggest it was a stone board game. In a study published today in the journal Antiquities, researchers used artificial intelligence to test this theory, while also identifying what the rules of the game might be.
Those who came before us enjoyed board games just as much as we did; This pastime dates back to at least the Bronze Age. The problem, however, is that many of these game components were not as permanent as Monopoly’s houses and hotels would certainly prove. In such a situation, the stone object discovered in Coriovallum, a Roman city in the modern Netherlands, could be a rare opportunity to investigate ancient nerds.
a mysterious ancient game
“We identified the object as a game because of the geometric patterns on its upper face and because of the evidence that it was deliberately shaped,” Walter Christ, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Leiden University who specializes in ancient board games, said in a statement. “Further evidence that this was a game is presented by visible damage to the surface that would be consistent with friction caused by sliding Roman-era game pieces across the surface.”
There’s only one problem. The above geometric pattern does not match any game known to researchers. To investigate the matter, Crist and his colleagues did what many people have to do these days – they asked an AI to try it out. Given human-generated scratches of artifacts, the team used AI to model possible game rules.
“The losses were unevenly distributed across the board,” Crist said. “We tried to answer the question whether we could use AI-powered simulated play as a tool to discover the rules of the game that would replicate this inconsistent pattern of use on the surface of this board with similar rules documented for other smaller games in Europe, thus confirming that the object was likely to be a game board.”
ai vs ai
The researchers asked two AIs to play a large number of ancient European board games, including Hrettaval from Scandinavia and Gioco Dell’Orso from Italy, until they arrived at a game that could cause the stone board to malfunction.
This approach eventually revealed a match with the Blocking Game, a type of board game whose objective is to block the other player’s movement (much like Ticket to Ride, if you play like my fiendish partner). It also reinforces the already existing theory that the artwork was a board game after all.
Crist concluded, “This is the first time that AI-powered simulated play has been used in conjunction with archaeological methods to identify a board game.” “This research provides archaeologists with the tools to be able to identify games from ancient cultures that are unusual or played atypically, as existing methods for identification rely on linking the geometric patterns that mark the playing surface to games that are known today from references in the text or from their artistic representations.”
Interestingly, the first known traces of blocking games only appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages and are overall very rare in the region. In other words, the study suggests that people may have played these types of games centuries earlier than researchers had thought.
It remains to be found out how many tears were shed and whether friendships were broken over the movement of the pieces on this board.
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