The Digital Ludeme Project: Combining archaeological and computational methods for the study of ancient board games

Abstract

Archaeologists and computer scientists have both studied board games since the early days of their fields. Early archaeologists had an interest in identifying ways of playing the games of antiquity, and they applied diffusionist models fashionable at the time to trace the development of games from antiquity to the games played in nineteenth century Europe and North America. In time, a huge amount of data on ancient games was collected, and in the last thirty years archaeologists have studied games as they relate to social processes. In parallel to this, artificial intelligence (AI) research has utilized board games, primarily as testbeds for developing AI techniques, but also as an application domain. Archaeological and AI methods are combined in the Digital Ludeme Project, which documents the preserved knowledge of ancient games and uses computational techniques to evaluate research questions that can be addressed through AI playouts of proposed rulesets for games.