Inferring the Past: A Computational Exploration of the Strategies that May Have Been Used in the Aztec Board Game of Patolli

Abstract

In this paper we use computational techniques to explore the Aztec board game of Patolli. Rules for the game were documented by the Spanish explorers that ultimately destroyed the Aztec civilization, yet there is no guarantee that the few players of Patolli that still exist follow the same strategies as the Aztec originators of the game. We implemented the rules of the game in an agent-based system and designed a series of experiments to pit game-playing agents using different strategies against each other to try to infer what makes a good strategy (and therefore what kind of information would have been taken into account by expert Aztec players back in the days when Patolli was an extremely popular game). In this paper we describe the game, explain our implementation, and present our experimental setup, results and conclusions.