You can now play ancient board games thanks to artificial intelligence

Before an AI can beat the pants off of you, it must first understand the rules of the game. That may not be the point of the Digital Ludeme Project, per se, but it certainly is the logical conclusion to its years-long goals. Per a new rundown from Wired, researchers and anthropologists have teamed up to help fill in the blanks to countless ancient board games whose rules have been lost to the ages with the help of artificial intelligence programming... and it is badass. Games like the Knossos Game and 58 Holes are first broken down into fundamental units of information called ludemes, which refers to elements of play such as the number of players, movement of pieces, or criteria to win. Once a game is codified in this manner, the team then fills in the missing pages of its rulebook with the help of relevant historical information, like when it or another game with similar ludemes was played and by whom.