Foundations of Digital Archæoludology (original) (raw)
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Foundations of Digital Arch{\ae}oludology
2019
Digital Archæoludology (DAL) is a new field of study involving the analysis and reconstruction of ancient games from incomplete descriptions and archaeological evidence using modern computational techniques. The aim is to provide digital tools and methods to help game historians and other researchers better understand traditional games, their development throughout recorded human history, and their relationship to the development of human culture and mathematical knowledge. This work is being explored in the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project. The aim of this inaugural international research meeting on DAL is to gather together leading experts in relevant disciplines – computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational phylogenetics, mathematics, history, archaeology, anthropology, etc. – to discuss the key themes and establish the foundations for this new field of research, so that it may continue beyond the lifetime of its initiating project. Seminar 10.–12....
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2023
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.
Modern Techniques for Ancient Games
2018
Games potentially provide a wealth of knowledge about our shared cultural past and the development of human civilisation, but our understanding of early games is incomplete and often based on unreliable reconstructions. This paper describes the Digital Ludeme Project, a five-year research project currently underway that aims to address such issues using modern computational techniques.
Reaching the Point of No Return: The Computational Revolution in Archaeology
Archaeologists generally agree that high-power computer technology constitutes the most efficient venue for addressing many issues in archaeological research. Digital techniques have become indispensable components of archaeological surveys, fieldwork, lab work, and communication between researchers. One of the greatest advantages of the digital approach is its ability to examine large assemblages of items using advanced statistical methods. Digital documentation has reached the point of no return in archaeological research, and reverting to traditional methods is highly improbable. However , digital data may also contain additional information that has yet to be extracted by computer analysis. In this arena, new computer algorithms can be triggered by research questions that cannot be addressed without digital models.
KI - Künstliche Intelligenz
This report summarises the Digital Ludeme Project, a recently launched 5-year research project being conducted at Maastricht University. This computational study of the world's traditional strategy games seeks to improve our understanding of early games, their development, and their role in the spread of related mathematical ideas throughout recorded human history.
Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits,
This report documents the program and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12382 ‘Perspectives Workshop: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits’. The workshop focused on the interaction of palaeography, the study of ancient and medieval documents, with computerized tools, particularly those developed for analysis of digital images and text mining. The goal of this marriage of disciplines is to provide ecient solutions to time-consuming and laborious palaeographic tasks. It furthermore attempts to provide scholars with quantitative evidence to palaeographical arguments, consequently facilitating a better understanding of our cultural heritage through the unique perspective of ancient and medieval documents. The workshop provided a vital opportunity for palaeographers to interact and discuss the potential of digital methods with computer scientists specializing in machine vision and statistical data analysis. This was essential not only in suggesting new directions and ideas for improving palaeographic research, but also in identifying questions which scholars working individually, in their respective fields, would not have asked without directly communicating with colleagues from outside their research community.
Report on the Digital Ludeme Project
ICGA Journal
This report summarises the discussions and conclusions of a recent Dagstuhl research meeting, in which the foundations of the new research field of Digital Archaeoludology were established. Starting with the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project, research in this field aims to use techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and other computational and data-driven techniques, to study traditional games. The primary goals include gaining improved insight into the ways games may have been played throughout history, and how they influenced and transferred between different civilisations. Additional expected contributions of the Digital Ludeme Project include advances in General Game Playing and related areas of research in AI.
Introduction: archaeological inferences and computational spaces
of the introduction to Bevan, A. and Lake, M. (eds.) Computational Approaches to Archaeological Spaces, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Spatial analysis in archaeology today encompasses a wide range of experiential, fieldwork-based, deterministic and/or stochastic approaches that vary considerably in their intended purpose and theoretical underpinnings. Although Hodder and Orton (1976) and both provided book--length treatment of the application of statistical and/or simulation approaches to spatial analysis in archaeology many years ago, the rapid uptake of computational methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and related methods in archaeology from the late 1980s and early 90s marks a disciplinary step change, for enthusiasts and critics alike, increasing by an order of magnitude the quantity of spatial data that could be managed and analysed, especially for those working at the scale of entire archaeological landscapes. The 1990s saw a string of methodologically focused edited volumes covering the development of archaeological GIS (Allen et al. 1990, Lock and Stancic 1995, Aldenderfer and Maschner 1996. The most recent in this vein is now over 10 years old (Lock 2000), perhaps partly reflecting the more mainstream adoption of 'standard' GIS techniques, as also evidenced by the appearance of textbooks on archaeological GIS (Wheatley and Gillings 2002, Conolly and Lake 2006, Chapman 2006) and recommendations for archaeological predictive modelling (Kamermans et al. 2009; Wescott and Brandon 2000, Mehrer and Wescott 2005). Since 2000 a major focus of methodological development in GIS has been integration with computer simulation, particularly agent--based modelling; the papers in Gimblett (2002) provide heritage management applications of this technology, while more research-oriented examples can be found in Kohler and Gummerman (2000). More generally, however, the last decade has seen something of a dichotomy in the presentation of new computational techniques as either forming part of something labelled "Digital Archaeology" (e.g. Evans and Daly 2006; and more widely the "Digital Humanities"; Bodenhamer et al. 2010) or as the handmaiden of more explicitly model--based (Kohler and van der Leeuw 2007) or spatial analytical (Robertson et al 2006) approaches to archaeological inference (see also McCoy and Ladfoged 2009). Gary Lock convincingly argued that the development of computer applications in archaeology has always reflected the entanglement of both methodological and wider theoretical advances, as documented in detail by others for the specific examples of GIS--based visibility analysis (Lake and Woodman 2003) and computer simulation (several papers in Costopoulos and Lake 2010). We are thus very conscious that any collection of computational approaches to archaeology will likewise be `of the moment', so it worth elaborating what makes this a particularly exciting moment at which to be presenting such a collection. Two broad sets of developments in the computational and social sciences over the last few years have conspired to create something of a research watershed and topical point of departure for a volume of this kind. The first set combines (a) some practical thresholds now reached in an otherwise continuous trajectory of growth in modern computing, (b) the Clarke, D.L., ed. 1977. Spatial Archaeology, London: Academic Press.
Computers and Mathematics in Archaeology, Anatomy of an Ineluctable Success!
Over the last fifty years the use of computer science and mathematics in archaeology has undergone continuous development and to date it has become an almost indispensable tool at any stage of the archaeological procedure: documentation, planning and data recording during surveys and excavations, laboratory studies, landscape analysis, reconstruction of social systems, archiving, mediation within the scientific community and amongst a broader public. New technologies have revolutionised the discipline: archaeological information systems, data retrieval systems, geographic information systems, 3D, the Internet, multidimensional data analysis, mathematical modelling and multi-agent systems. But the most ambitious contribution lies in the field of the formalisation of a general theoretical framework of the discipline, the independence of which from any paradigm and ideology could raise archaeology to the level of the leading scientific disciplines.