
Modern Artificial Intelligence for Ancient Games - beefman
http://ludeme.eu/project/
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autocorr
The principal investigator of the project, Cameron Browne, has invented many
very interesting abstract games himself [1]. He also investigated how
computers could create games with the program LUDI used to create Yavalath [2]
among others. I'm really interested to see how the optimization and learning
framework he used in LUDI will shed light on ancient games we only barely know
the rules of!

Although something I'm curious about is that the rules predicted are chosen on
metrics of elegance and complexity (and maybe fun when you do them yourself)
but how accurate will this be in reconstructing rules for games in which know
them? For example, how accurate would it reconstruct backgammon or 13th
century chess? This sort of verification I think is very interesting in quasi-
testing observational science, like testing the methods of comparative
linguistics by predicting French from Latin.

[1]
[http://cambolbro.com/games/index.html](http://cambolbro.com/games/index.html)
[2]
[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33767/yavalath](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33767/yavalath)

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beefman
I can highly recommend Nestorgames, the vendor linked from your second
reference. Great source of affordable sets for Yavalath and many other
interesting abstracts.

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sankalp210691
Wow, this looks really interesting. I wonder how the internals work!

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gwern
Based on [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz483y/scientists-are-
dis...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz483y/scientists-are-discovering-
long-lost-rules-for-ancient-board-games) the idea seems to be that you encode
the possible rules into a standard software framework which provides a general
interface to board games; then you use MCTS as a general game-playing agent
(since MCTS works on anything you can build a game tree for), and you run the
MCTS agents for many long games. The games then get 'scored' for game quality:
were there reversals of fortune as the search depth increased? Did sometimes
the losing player early on wind up winning in the end? Did games usually end
in a victory for one side? Did they go on for a reasonable length of turns,
neither too long nor too short? Each set of rules gets a quality score, and
the rulesets which lead to the best corpus of games are considered more likely
to be close to how the original games worked.

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eukaryote31
Many popular games even today are not "high quality" in the slightest, though.
(Think Monopoly)

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gwern
I dunno about 'many'. Monopoly is infamous for being bad, is popular only for
legacy reasons, and is rapidly fading. (My own family used to play Monopoly
frequently, but I can't remember the last time we did, because the last few
times we were able to play on the holidays, we were playing games like
Pandemic or Settlers or Hill House or D&D...) If you look at how kids spend
their time, on things like Minecraft or Fortnite, I think the overwhelming
majority of them are better games than Monopoly.

