Rundown 2 — AI decodes an ancient Roman board game

51:36ancient Roman board game. It was sitting in a museum and some people who are really into board games from antiquity and from like human civilization saw it and wanted to analyze it. The rules are lost to history obviously. There's no like you know >> you know the manual that comes with the board game about what the rules are. Okay, there's nothing that we can do that. But what we can do is look at that slab of limestone and figure out where the wear and tear is. And then we can use AI >> to play thousands of simulated games. >> God, >> with various rules, >> right? >> Right. >> So, an AI plays with itself. This is kind of like how deep Google DeepMind

52:16trained um Alph Go. Yep. >> You know? >> Yep. >> So, we've got all of these AIs that are playing thousands of different rules. And from those thousands of different games, tens of thousands of different games, we can figure out which games required the movement of pieces, right? Such that it would match the wear and tear on the limestone slab. >> And they figured out about like I think there were like >> four um four to nine different games. There's and they're all of a particular type >> that are still kind of played in Scandinavia >> and they match the wear and tear of this

52:57thing and it turns out it's like an asymmetric blockade game. You can actually go and play it. They they made an online version of it. It's called Ludus um Coriovali. It's played with four hounds trying to trap two hairs. That's what they called it. Okay. But it's it's very cool because it's like a use of AI to something that I literally never thought about. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a clever it's a clever use case because >> you you have some kind of physical indicator which is the wear Yeah. >> and tear and ultimately there's a finite number of options for what the rule set was for the game that would result in especially on a limestone board >> that kind of wear and tear. So like

53:38makes logical sense but I never would have >> I never would have thought of that. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean it's really cool because this discovery pushes the known history of these types of board games back several centuries now, you know. >> Fant uh we we love our archaeology. We we've touched on Rome a couple times >> and this is out of Lighten University in the journal Antiquity. >> Yes, this is good, good, good. We are going to keep it hot with our story number three. This one is a genetics and human evolution story. How we became human might be related to unsurprisingly our fingers. But what about this one is particularly interesting. >> Yeah, this one was really cool because usually when we think about human

54:19evolution, we always think about brain size right? >> Yes. >> Bigger brain size means we're smarter, means we're more humanlike to modern day humans. This new research points to the fact that prenatal hormones >> that we are subject to when we are in our mother's womb. Um that's actually a