{"id":474521,"date":"2026-02-12T06:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T06:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/474521\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T06:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T06:37:15","slug":"a-roman-era-stone-baffled-experts-ai-may-have-solved-the-mystery-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/474521\/","title":{"rendered":"A Roman-Era Stone Baffled Experts. AI May Have Solved The Mystery. : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers.<\/p>\n

Now, with the help of artificial intelligence<\/a>, scientists believe they have cracked the mystery: the stone is an ancient board game and they have even guessed the rules.<\/p>\n

The circular piece of limestone has diagonal and straight lines cut into it.<\/p>\n

Using 3D imaging, scientists discovered some lines were deeper than others, suggesting pieces were moved along them, some more than others.<\/p>\n

\"scanA visualisation (left) of the depth map of the stone (right), demonstrating lower surfaces (pink). (Antiquity\/AFP)<\/p>\n

“We can see wear along the lines on the stone, exactly where you would slide a piece,” said Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Leiden University who specialises in ancient games.<\/p>\n

Other researchers at Maastricht University then used an artificial intelligence programme that can deduce the rules to ancient games.<\/p>\n

They trained this AI, baptised Ludii, with the rules of about 100 ancient games from the same area as the Roman stone.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

The computer “produced dozens of possible rule sets. It then played the game against itself and identified a few variants that are enjoyable for humans to play,” said Dennis Soemers, from Maastricht University.<\/p>\n

They then cross-checked the possible rules with the wear on the stone to uncover the most likely set of movements in the game.<\/p>\n

\"whiteA smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers. (Antiquity\/AFP)<\/p>\n

However, Soemers also sounded a note of caution.<\/p>\n

“If you present Ludii with a line pattern like the one on the stone, it will always find game rules. Therefore, we cannot be sure that the Romans played it in precisely that way,” he said.<\/p>\n

Related: Ancient Discovery Could Be a Board Game From 4,000 Years Ago<\/a><\/p>\n

The aim of the “deceptively simple but thrilling strategy game” was to hunt and trap the opponent’s pieces in as few moves as possible.<\/p>\n

The research and the possible rules were published in the journal Antiquity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Agence France-Presse<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-474521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}