An old, flattened piece of limestone inscribed with a crisscross of grooves looks like the board for a game, 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 the board was probably part of a “blocking” game played by the Romans.
The innovative approach to solving how the game was played had virtual game players run through more than 100 sets of possible rules. The researchers’ goal was to determine which set of rules best created the wear patterns on the limestone, Leiden University archaeologist Walter Crist and his colleagues report in the February