Ludii

Cameron Browne's team at Luxembourg's Henri Poincaré Institute built Ludii because no one alive knew how Romans actually played their board games—and now thanks to their AI, we're starting to find out. The system runs millions of Monte Carlo simulations on proposed rule sets, filtering out anything that produces historically impossible outcomes—which sounds niche, but it's exactly the kind of problem-set university labs will pay serious funding to solve. Three postdocs and a PhD candidate building something historians couldn't crack solo: that's the kind of obscure vertical where AI wins before big tech even notices it exists.