[Waterluvian]

This feels like the thing that makes me deeply skeptical of swaths of archaeology and palaeontology as a science rather than being a kind of fandom.

I imagine the incentives of having a crisp story for media consumption don’t help. I’d hope to read a lot more: “we’re missing the majority of the pieces to this puzzle. This represents our best guess given current evidence and methods.”

[beloch]

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.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Their AI is "alpha-beta search agents" which, unless that's a very misleading description, sounds like a bunch of instances of minimax with alpha-beta pruning [1]. Which indeed should be the simplest, cheapest and most sensible option for that kind of game. I mean, no need to run an LLM/ agent harness on such a simple board game, that'd be overkill. And, well, tbh, it wouldn't work as well.

So they could have used wear patterns as a component in an evaluation function used in minimax but I get the feeling they most likely did a wear analysis afterwards to weed out some of the possible rulesets indicated by the minimax play patterns.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning

[Waterluvian]

I think the study would be more palatable if it was presented as an exploration of AI-aided methods and very strongly impressed that any one result was not the point.

[Shorel]

There's a huge difference between "asking and AI" meaning a prompt to a LLM, and very particular simulation fine tuned to this problem where the evaluation criteria is matching the exact wear found in the real boards. This work is much closer to a numerical simulation than anything you can call AI.

[falseprofit]

The wear on the pieces and board was not an input for the AI tool they used.

Also, they didn’t “ask” an AI anything, as it was not a natural language AI tool.

[sophacles]

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.

[tokai]

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

[4ndrewl]

New here? This is the best place to find Dunning Kruger in the wild!

[Shorel]

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.

[wrsh07]

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?

[kridsdale1]

My favorite dinosaur theory is they looked far more like a plump turkey than a Komodo dragon.

We tend to just drape a bounding skin volume over the bones and give it a color, MAYBE some feathers.

But a whale skeleton looks nothing like the mass of flesh of a whale. Skeletons give no clue about an Elephant’s head shape.

So imagine a huge fluffy owl or yellow chick with a trex skeleton deep inside.