A smooth white stone from the Roman era unearthed in the Netherlands has long puzzled researchers.
Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, scientists believe they have solved the mystery. Stone is an ancient board game and even guessed the rules.
There are diagonal lines and cuts in the circular limestone.
Using 3D imaging, scientists discovered that some lines are deeper than others. This suggests that debris was moved along some lines more than others.
“You can see the wear along the line of the stone, exactly where the stone was slid,” said Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Leiden University who specializes in ancient games.
Other researchers at Maastricht University then used an artificial intelligence program that was able to deduce the rules of the ancient game.
They trained this AI, Rudy, who was baptized using the rules of about 100 ancient games from the same region as Stone of Rome.
Dennis Sommers from Maastricht University said the computer “generated dozens of possible rule sets. We then played it against itself and identified several variations that humans would enjoy playing.”
We then matched possible rules with stone wear to reveal the most likely sequence of moves in the game.
But Sommers also issued a warning.
“If you present Rudy with a pattern of lines like those on a stone, he’s bound to find the rules of the game. So we can’t be sure that the Romans played the game exactly that way,” he says.
The objective of “a seemingly simple but thrilling strategy game” was to corner and trap the opponent’s pieces in as few moves as possible.
The study and possible rules were published in the journal Antiquity.
rick/gv
