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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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Maybe they were playing Gobblet Gobblers instead which is a much more fun game on the same size board.

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.

Thank you. I had never played it, surprisingly fun. Much like Ludo but actually better.

It's far from random. Reconstructing it with game playing AIs is a bit excessive maybe, but blocking games (hare games) are a style of game which are very widely historically attested.