this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
86 points (98.9% liked)

Archaeology

2411 readers
14 users here now

Welcome to c/Archaeology @ Mander.xyz!

Shovelbums welcome. 🗿

Notice Board

This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

About

Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. No pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology.

Links

Archaeology 101:

Get Involved:

University and Field Work:

Jobs and Career:

Professional Organisations:

FOSS Tools:

Datasets:

Fun:

Other Resources:

Similar Communities

Sister Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Plants & Gardening

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Memes

Find us on Reddit

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
86
Researchers finally uncover how to play the 4,000-year-old Shahr-i Sokhta board game (archaeologymag.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

If I got this right the relationship between this and the game of Ur is a lot like chess vs. shōgi: similar board and objective; common origin; different pieces, rules, and strategy.

Modern AI techniques are further aiding the understanding of ancient games. By simulating thousands of potential rulesets, AI algorithms help determine which rules result in enjoyable gameplay.

The "AI" in question is probably more like chess engines, and completely unlike LLMs or diffusion models. Just a way to simulate a huge number of games between decent-ish players, for any given ruleset. That allows you to check if any given ruleset has blatant issues, like:

  • One side almost always wins
  • The winner is determined too early
  • The game takes too few or too many turns to complete
  • There are "cheesing" strategies

Gamesets with those issues are unlikely to be played by human beings enough to allow the game to spread.

There's probably a lot of guesswork in the ruleset that the researchers chose though.