5 ms·

This article is horrible. We have no idea what's on those seals. If it's even a script, it might be personal names. The inscriptions are all very short. We hav

by rvense 5y ago

This article is horrible. We have no idea what's on those seals. If it's even a script, it might be personal names. The inscriptions are all very short. We have no idea how the script is structured, if it's syllabic or what. We have absolutely no idea what language it's written in. There is nothing to latch on to, no way to anchor the findings in the real world. The problem with applying AI to this is that it will give an answer, but there's absolutely no way to verify it's a reasonable one.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago
I was expected this, even title is a clickbait.
melony 5y ago
We can break codes by cryptography, a network pre trained on all human languages should be able to derive insights unsupervised.
- rnhmjoj 5y ago
  This is akin to breaking a one-time-pad cipher: you could easily come up with many possible plaintext but there is no way of verifying one is correct.
- tgv 5y ago
  If you can build a network, that can crack Enigma after being trained on German and preceding encryption methods, then you might have made a step towards this. But note that cracking enigma "only" took a few people a few months, that these scripts have eluded many people for a much longer time, and that the source language of Enigma was known, as was its script.
  - eru 5y ago
    I get your general point, but the Enigma (or any encryption) is a pretty bad example. Encrypted text 'wants' to be obscure, even to those who know the system but lack the key. Most writing systems 'want' to be decipherable to people in the know. In addition, Enigma has a fairly short key length by modern standards, and lots of accidental flaws that make it even easier to crack. (Eg an automated system that knows a lot of German _might_ be able to figure out that the enigma never encrypts a letter to itself, even without seeing any schematics.)
    - mcswell 5y ago
      "the enigma never encrypts a letter to itself": I recall that the clue to one day's cypher was a longish document that contained every letter except 'L'. The analyst guessed that it was produced by somebody running a test who kept typing the letter 'L'--she was right.
- rvense 5y ago
  "Insights"? When you break an encryption scheme, you get a readable text in a language you understand. The thing is, the written word as an artifact does not itself contain its meaning. To go from writing to meaning is what's called knowing language. The context needed to do that is in the mind of the reader, it's not in the text. Writing something down is quite simply not the same as encrypting it. What we have here is a few thousand small inscriptions of less than ten characters each. We assume - but don't know for sure - that the characters correspond to sounds, and, if they do, what kind of sounds - syllables, phonemes, maybe a mixture. And even if you could go to sound, then, in order to understand anything, you have to go from sound to meaning, if indeed there is meaning. Which requires knowing the language. And not only do we not know the language, we don't even know what language it is! It might be related to a language of the region, it might not.
  - melony 5y ago
    I did not have to flesh out my reply, what I meant was in an information theoretic sense. We have methods such as differential cryptanalysis that can operate with very few "hints" to start.
    - melony 5y ago
      *time to
    - rvense 5y ago
      This is not a cryptographic problem. The relationship between ciphertext and plaintext is nothing at all like the relationship between a text and its meaning or translation.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > We can break codes by cryptography Modern cryptography is really good. Without quantum computers, it's unlikely a 16384-bit RSA key will be broken in your lifetime by a motivated actor.
  - rvense 5y ago
    This is not a cryptographic problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- abdulhaq 5y ago
  Sardonic comments like these kind of break HN. You are being sardonic, right? Right???
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> We can break codes by cryptography, a network pre trained on all human languages should be able to derive insights unsupervised. Well, we have a few models of English (large language models like BERT and friends, or the GPT's etc). What insights have they derived about English? What insights have we derived about English from such models? Edit: nice paper to read before forming expectations about insights deriveable from language modelling. Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form and Understanding in the Age of Data. https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf
qazpot 5y ago
If a headline asks a question, the answer is no.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  Betteridge's Law of Headlines... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
zeckalpha 5y ago
Welcome to linguistics! That happens all the time and human linguists are trained to do exactly the same thing. At one point in college, I was frustrated with an assignment and said “it could either be this or that but I need another datapoint to disambiguate it”, and someone suggested I look at the back of the page.
- rvense 5y ago
  > Welcome to linguistics! I've been trying to run away from bad computational linguistics for ten years after making a wrong turn in college. Wish I'd stuck to CxG! Sometimes I actually think people post these kinds of articles here to ruin my mornings. Did you see the one on the Voynich manuscript where they'd decided it was in Hebrew and done a bunch of maths to it and then, when the person they asked who actually knew Hebrew said "this doesn't make sense", they'd put it into Google Translate and accepted the spell checker's suggestion and then put that as the conclusion of their paper? Fun times.

by rvense 5y ago

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

I was expected this, even title is a clickbait.

melony 5y ago

We can break codes by cryptography, a network pre trained on all human languages should be able to derive insights unsupervised.

rnhmjoj 5y ago
This is akin to breaking a one-time-pad cipher: you could easily come up with many possible plaintext but there is no way of verifying one is correct.
tgv 5y ago
If you can build a network, that can crack Enigma after being trained on German and preceding encryption methods, then you might have made a step towards this. But note that cracking enigma "only" took a few people a few months, that these scripts have eluded many people for a much longer time, and that the source language of Enigma was known, as was its script.
- eru 5y ago
  I get your general point, but the Enigma (or any encryption) is a pretty bad example. Encrypted text 'wants' to be obscure, even to those who know the system but lack the key. Most writing systems 'want' to be decipherable to people in the know. In addition, Enigma has a fairly short key length by modern standards, and lots of accidental flaws that make it even easier to crack. (Eg an automated system that knows a lot of German _might_ be able to figure out that the enigma never encrypts a letter to itself, even without seeing any schematics.)
  - mcswell 5y ago
    "the enigma never encrypts a letter to itself": I recall that the clue to one day's cypher was a longish document that contained every letter except 'L'. The analyst guessed that it was produced by somebody running a test who kept typing the letter 'L'--she was right.
rvense 5y ago
"Insights"? When you break an encryption scheme, you get a readable text in a language you understand. The thing is, the written word as an artifact does not itself contain its meaning. To go from writing to meaning is what's called knowing language. The context needed to do that is in the mind of the reader, it's not in the text. Writing something down is quite simply not the same as encrypting it. What we have here is a few thousand small inscriptions of less than ten characters each. We assume - but don't know for sure - that the characters correspond to sounds, and, if they do, what kind of sounds - syllables, phonemes, maybe a mixture. And even if you could go to sound, then, in order to understand anything, you have to go from sound to meaning, if indeed there is meaning. Which requires knowing the language. And not only do we not know the language, we don't even know what language it is! It might be related to a language of the region, it might not.
- melony 5y ago
  I did not have to flesh out my reply, what I meant was in an information theoretic sense. We have methods such as differential cryptanalysis that can operate with very few "hints" to start.
  - melony 5y ago
    *time to
  - rvense 5y ago
    This is not a cryptographic problem. The relationship between ciphertext and plaintext is nothing at all like the relationship between a text and its meaning or translation.
dehrmann 5y ago
> We can break codes by cryptography Modern cryptography is really good. Without quantum computers, it's unlikely a 16384-bit RSA key will be broken in your lifetime by a motivated actor.
- rvense 5y ago
  This is not a cryptographic problem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
abdulhaq 5y ago
Sardonic comments like these kind of break HN. You are being sardonic, right? Right???
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> We can break codes by cryptography, a network pre trained on all human languages should be able to derive insights unsupervised. Well, we have a few models of English (large language models like BERT and friends, or the GPT's etc). What insights have they derived about English? What insights have we derived about English from such models? Edit: nice paper to read before forming expectations about insights deriveable from language modelling. Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form and Understanding in the Age of Data. https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf

qazpot 5y ago

If a headline asks a question, the answer is no.

DrBazza 5y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

zeckalpha 5y ago

Welcome to linguistics! That happens all the time and human linguists are trained to do exactly the same thing. At one point in college, I was frustrated with an assignment and said “it could either be this or that but I need another datapoint to disambiguate it”, and someone suggested I look at the back of the page.

rvense 5y ago
> Welcome to linguistics! I've been trying to run away from bad computational linguistics for ten years after making a wrong turn in college. Wish I'd stuck to CxG! Sometimes I actually think people post these kinds of articles here to ruin my mornings. Did you see the one on the Voynich manuscript where they'd decided it was in Hebrew and done a bunch of maths to it and then, when the person they asked who actually knew Hebrew said "this doesn't make sense", they'd put it into Google Translate and accepted the spell checker's suggestion and then put that as the conclusion of their paper? Fun times.