Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games

Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games

About

The Digital Ludeme Project is a five year ERC-funded research project hosted by Maastricht University. This project is a computational study of the world's traditional strategy games throughout recorded human history. It aims to improve our understanding of traditional games using modern AI techniques, to chart their historical development and explore their role in the development of human culture and the spread of mathematical ideas.

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Summary

The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical research into games and their use as tools of cultural analysis, much is based on the interpretation of partial evidence with little mathematical analysis. This project will use modern computational techniques to help fill these gaps in our knowledge empirically.

We will represent games as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information), which will allow the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single software system for the first time. This system will not only model and play games, but will evaluate reconstructions for quality and historical authenticity, and automatically improve them where possible. This will lay the foundations for a new field of study called Digital Archaeoludology (DA).

The ludemic model reveals innate mathematical relationships between games, allowing phylogenetic analysis. This provides a mechanism for creating a family tree/network of traditional games, which could reveal missing links and allow ancestral state reconstruction to shed light on the gaps in our partial knowledge. Locating ludemes culturally provides a mechanism for charting the transmission of mathematical ideas across cultures through play. This project seeks to bridge the gap between historical and computational studies of games, to provide greater insight into our understanding of games as cultural artefacts, and to pioneer new tools and techniques for their continued analysis. The aim is to restore and preserve our intangible cultural heritage (of game playing) through the tangible evidence available.
  

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Aims

The key research objectives of this project are to:

1. Model the full range of traditional strategy games in a single playable database.

2. Reconstruct missing knowledge about traditional games with an unprecedented degree of accuracy.

3. Map the transmission of games and associated mathematical ideas across history and culture.

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