3 ms·

The biggest bottleneck is getting the experts to read it. You need a decade or so of graduate level education and interpreting things takes apparently quite a l

The biggest bottleneck is getting the experts to read it. You need a decade or so of graduate level education and interpreting things takes apparently quite a long time. Maybe that's another AI application.

digging 3y ago
As much as I'd like to endorse study of the classics, I'm almost certain that AI will be better at interpreting the texts than humans very soon.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  GPT 4.0 isn’t even remotely close to being useful at all in this case so I have some doubts about ‘very soon’
bluGill 3y ago
I doubt it. Most universities have some professor in this area and a few graduate students. There is very little else for them to read (the entire of all classic books we have fits on a shelf), and most of them can read the original language. They will read this as soon as it is available just because it they don't have much else to read that is a primary source material. Thus everything new is of great interest because there is so little to work with.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in the 1800s, has been fully digitized and experts expect it to take I think 150 additional years before they can all be read to the level of scholarship that's required I found some conversation on the difficulty here https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/how_many_oxyrhynchus_papyri_are_left/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/h...
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Thanks for the link. However the problems there do not seem to apply here. There the problem seems to be lots of little fragments that need to be fit together to figure out the scroll. Here the scrolls are complete in one piece, so we have a much better idea of how the parts fit together (not perfect since this is layers that have to be combined, but close). There just getting the text is hard, here we mostly have the text (though we will need to error correct, they are at least readable)

digging 3y ago

As much as I'd like to endorse study of the classics, I'm almost certain that AI will be better at interpreting the texts than humans very soon.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
GPT 4.0 isn’t even remotely close to being useful at all in this case so I have some doubts about ‘very soon’

bluGill 3y ago

I doubt it. Most universities have some professor in this area and a few graduate students. There is very little else for them to read (the entire of all classic books we have fits on a shelf), and most of them can read the original language. They will read this as soon as it is available just because it they don't have much else to read that is a primary source material. Thus everything new is of great interest because there is so little to work with.

kristopolous 3y ago
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in the 1800s, has been fully digitized and experts expect it to take I think 150 additional years before they can all be read to the level of scholarship that's required I found some conversation on the difficulty here https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/how_many_oxyrhynchus_papyri_are_left/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/h...
- bluGill 3y ago
  Thanks for the link. However the problems there do not seem to apply here. There the problem seems to be lots of little fragments that need to be fit together to figure out the scroll. Here the scrolls are complete in one piece, so we have a much better idea of how the parts fit together (not perfect since this is layers that have to be combined, but close). There just getting the text is hard, here we mostly have the text (though we will need to error correct, they are at least readable)