Archaeologists could not figure out what a puzzling stone artifact from roman coriovallum was used…
archaeologists could not figure out what a puzzling stone artifact from roman coriovallum was used for, so they programmed two ai agents to play each other under different rule sets, and the wear matched a blocking game like tic-tac-toe that europe supposedly did not have before the middle ages. ai is also rebuilding missing passages in 2,000-year-old inscriptions.
the newest archaeologist on the dig is a model trained on games nobody remembers.
Context
Antiquity published 'Ludus Coriovalli: using artificial intelligence-driven simulations to identify rules for an ancient board game' on Feb 11, 2026. It concerns lines incised on a piece of rounded limestone found at the Roman site of Coriovallum in Heerlen, the Netherlands, held at Het Romeins Museum, and Maastricht University hosts the data and software for the AI-simulated play.
Google DeepMind's Aeneas, reported by Nature on Jul 23, 2025, is a model for contextualizing ancient Latin inscriptions that helps historians restore fragmentary texts.
The Coriovallum stone and the AI-simulated play match the Antiquity paper, dated Feb 11, 2026. That the wear matched a blocking game like tic-tac-toe, that Europe lacked such games before the Middle Ages and the two-agent setup were not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. in the excerpts read. The inscription restoration refers to Aeneas, which targets Latin inscriptions; the 2,000-year age was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. 'The newest archaeologist is a model trained on games nobody remembers' is the author's opinion.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the paper's section on the rule sets the agents played.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 1 October 2026 at 18:08 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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