5 ms·
Cool, it can decipher Linear B, like humans, because there's a bunch of data points for Linear B (IIRC around 6.5K inscriptions in the corpus) and because it's
by EdwardDiego 5y ago
Cool, it can decipher Linear B, like humans, because there's a bunch of data points for Linear B (IIRC around 6.5K inscriptions in the corpus) and because it's known that it's written in Mycenaean Greek, and Ancient Greek gives us a place to start working backwards from.
But then there's Linear A. Only has 1500 inscriptions or so. And no translation.
So, Harappan/Indus script has about 4K known inscriptions. And descendant languages to work backwards from are still unknown.
Well, I wish them good luck. But I don't know if ML can do any better than humans. It might be able to do what humans can faster, but I doubt it can do what we can't.
That said, I would love to be proven wrong, because I love the idea of the Indus valley civilisation being where "all the wise men in boats" (to paraphrase Pratchett) came from, given the obvious proximity of the Indus Valley to the Persian Gulf and thus Mesopotamia.
Bonus points if someone translates a Harappan inscription and it says "By the way, if some guy called Noah turns up in a boat, claiming to have been spared from a global flood, he's a bit nutty, it was just a heavy monsoon."
- eru 5y ago> Well, I wish them good luck. But I don't know if ML can do any better than humans. It might be able to do what humans can faster, but I doubt it can do what we can't. Being faster might be enough? Who knows, perhaps some human spending a few centuries in deep contemplation of Linear A might crack it?
- yorwba 5y agoHumans have already spent combined person-centuries trying to crack Linear A, and been able to guess a few words from context. If you use the sound values from Linear B (which can be guessed via Greek), you can even try to pronounce them out loud. Unfortunately, that doesn't help at all unless you can find a related language to help guess more words. If it's a language isolate without living relatives, that would be simply impossible. However, that doesn't mean that trying to solve it with ML is completely useless. If you can do a century's worth of hypothesis-testing in a fraction of the time to discover that none of them work, at least humans will waste less time trying to solve an unsolvable problem.
- rvense 5y agoIt's not about deep contemplation, it's about having the necessary information. If I write down a sentence in a language you don't speak, and make it impossible for you to ever get any information at all about the language it's written in (say, by burning every book about it and killing everyone who knows it), how many centuries of contemplation do you think it would take for your to understand it? Language decipherment, whether by human or machine, is not done by staring at the words you don't understand. It's done by comparing it to things you do. And here we have nothing.
- petters 5y agoIf you have lots of text and nothing else, deep contemplation can lead to understanding. This is far from the case here though, so you are right.
- rvense 5y agoI don't understand how you could say that it ever would. If you don't have anything at all (a related language, partial translations, accompanying illustrations, anything) to compare to, what can you do? You're trying to extract something (meaning) from an object that just does not contain it (text).
- simiones 5y agoTheoretically, given huge amounts of text, you can try to match it with possible human communication, based on the experience of being human - but you would likely need huge amounts of guesses, so it's unlikely to be truly doable with plausible computation resources.
- petters 5y agoGPT-3 proves that it is possible. It can reason about and answer novel questions just by looking at huge amounts of text.
- rvense 5y ago
- kkoncevicius 5y agoCan you give more context for the "wise men in boats" idea?
- alophawen 5y agoPratchett, Terry
- AndrewDucker 5y agohttp://www.chrisjoneswriting.com/terry-pratchett-quotes/ankh-morpork6 http://www.chrisjoneswriting.com/terry-pratchett-quotes/ankh...
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoRe Linear B, it's also worth pointing out that prior to its decipherment the prevailing view was that it wasn't Greek; Ventris spent most of his time trying to align it to Etruscan, and only made the breakthrough when he tried out a few Greek words more or less on a whim. I imagine that had almost any form of computerised automation been readily available in the 50s it would have made the decipherment vastly simpler, but it would require an existing hypothesis of Greek; an AI trying to fit it to Etruscan would have been merely banging its head against an electronic wall.