An ancient Roman game board's secrets are revealed - with AI's help

"A mysterious ancient Roman object found in what is now the southern tip of the Netherlands has long been thought to be some sort of board game."

"With the help of artificial-intelligence simulations, Walter Crist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his collaborators have now found that it was most likely a 'blocking game', a type of board game that was not known to exist in Europe before the Middl e Ages."

An ancient Roman object from the southern tip of the Netherlands displays features consistent with a playable board game. Artificial-intelligence simulations evaluated possible rule sets and indicate a blocking-game mechanism as the most plausible. The blocking-game classification involves movement that obstructs opponents rather than direct capture and aligns with the artifact’s layout and wear patterns. This classification establishes the presence of that game type in Europe during the Roman period rather than originating in the Middle Ages. The result implies more complex recreational practices in Roman-era Europe and demonstrates the usefulness of computational modeling for interpreting ambiguous artifacts.

Read at Nature