10 ms·

How AI is unlocking ancient texts

204 points by Marceltan 2y ago

fredtalty5 2y ago
[dead]
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
(2024)
- Tagbert 2y ago
  :-)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
datavirtue 2y ago
Nothing to see here. LLMs and AI suck and aren't really good at anything. /s The world is about to change much faster than any of us have ever witnessed to this point. What a life.
- muglug 2y ago
  There’s a big difference between LLMs and this application of CNNs and RNNs. Very few people on HN are claiming there’s no value to neural networks — CNNs have been heralded here for well over a decade.
- mcphage 2y ago
  There are definitely things they’re good at. And there’s definitely things that they’re bad at, worse than nothing at all. The problem is how often they’re being used in the later case, and how rarely in the former.
- zeofig 2y ago
  Build a strawman, knock him down, and plant the glorious flag of hyperbole on his strawwy corpse.
mlepath 2y ago
This is a great application of various domains of ML. This reminds me of Vesuvius Challenge. This kid of thing is accessible to beginners too since the data by definition are pretty limitted.
- jhanschoo 2y ago
  Perhaps you missed it while skimming, but indeed, the Vesuvius Challenge is a primary topic of discussion in the article :)
adriand 2y ago
I find this incredibly exciting. There could be some truly remarkable works whose contents are about to be revealed, and we don’t really know what we might find. Histories of the ancient (more ancient) world. Accounts of contact with cultures and civilizations that are currently lost to history. Scientific and mathematical discoveries. And what I often find to be the most moving: stories of daily life that illuminate what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  Which becomes a real gotcha when it turns out to be hallucinated 'content' misleading people into following their assumptions on what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago. What we call AI does have superhuman powers but they are not powers of insight, they are powers of generalization. AI is more capable than a human is of homogenizing experience down to what a current snapshot of 'human thought' would be, because it's by definition PEOPLE rather than 'person'. The effort to invoke a specific perspective from it (that seems ubiquitous) sees AI at its worst. This idea that you could use it to correctly extract a specific perspective from the long dead, is wildly, wildly misguided.
Sparkyte 2y ago
Can't wait to read ancient smutt from the time.
- sapphicsnail 2y ago
  I wouldn't call in smut but there are 5 surviving Greek novels and some Roman elegaic poetry that's a little horny. We know there used to be a lot of crazier stuff but it mostly doesn't survive.
mmooss 2y ago
There isn't much about accuracy: "Ithaca restored artificially produced gaps in ancient texts with 62% accuracy, compared with 25% for human experts. But experts aided by Ithaca’s suggestions had the best results of all, filling gaps with an accuracy of 72%. Ithaca also identified the geographical origins of inscriptions with 71% accuracy, and dated them to within 30 years of accepted estimates." and "[Using] an RNN to restore missing text from a series of 1,100 Mycenaean tablets ... written in a script called Linear B in the second millennium bc. In tests with artificially produced gaps, the model’s top ten predictions included the correct answer 72% of the time, and in real-world cases it often matched the suggestions of human specialists." Obviously 62%, 72%, 72% in ten tries, etc. is not sufficient by itself. How do scholars use these tools? Without some external source to verify the truth, you can't know if the software output is accurate. And if you have some reliable external source, you don't need the software. Obviously, they've thought of that, and it's worth experimenting with these powerful tools. But I wonder how they've solved that problem.
- sapphicsnail 2y ago
  > Obviously 62%, 72%, 72% in ten tries, etc. is not sufficient by itself. How do scholars use these tools? Without some external source to verify the truth, you can't know if the software output is accurate. And if you have some reliable external source, you don't need the software. Without an extant text to compare, everything would be a guess. Maybe this would be helpful if you're trying to get a rough and dirty translation of a bunch of papyri or inscriptions? Until we have an AI that's able to adequately explain it's reasoning I can't see this replacing philologists with domain-specific expertise who are able to walk you through the choices they made.
  - EA-3167 2y ago
    I wonder if maybe the goal is to provide the actual scholars with options, approaches or translations they hadn't thought of yet. In essence just what you said, structured guessing, but if you can have a well-trained bot guess within specific bounds countless times and output the patterns in the guesses, maybe it would be enough. Not, "My AI translated this ancient fragment of text," but "My AI sent us in a direction we hadn't previously had the time or inclination to explore, which turned out to be fruitful."
zozbot234 2y ago
The really nice thing about this is that the AI can now acquire these newly-decoded texts as part of its training set, and begin learning at a geometric rate.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  errors in => errors out
  - WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
    Don't forget to spice it up with some bias! https://x.com/i/grok/share/uMwJwGkl2XVUep0N4ZPV1QUx6 https://x.com/i/grok/share/uMwJwGkl2XVUep0N4ZPV1QUx6
- rzzzt 2y ago
  But do I want to see ancient programming advice written in Linear B?
- zeofig 2y ago
  Why not just feed it random data? It's so smart that it will figure out which parts are random, so eventually you will generate some good data randomly, and it will feed on it, and become exponentially smarter exponentially fast.
  - Validark 2y ago
    This is actually hilarious and I'm sad you are getting downvoted for it.
- nitwit005 2y ago
  With our current methods, feeding back even fairly small amounts of outputs back in as training data leads to declining performance. Just think of it abstractly. The AI will be trained on the errors the previous generation made. As long as it keeps making new errors each generation, they will tend to multiply.
taffronaut 2y ago
From TFA "decoding rare and lost languages of which hardly any traces survive". Assuming that's not hype, let's see it have a go at Rongorongo[1] then. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
- nick238 2y ago
  and Linear A [1]. To be fair, whatever model would require data about the context of where the texts were found unless the corpus is massive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
  - shellfishgene 2y ago
    It's mentioned in the article that they hope the model for Linear B can also help with Linear A.
yzydserd 2y ago
Klaatu barada nikto
userbinator 2y ago
The full title is "How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history", and that second part is especially fitting, although unfortunately not mentioned in the article itself, which is full of rather horrifying stories about using AI to "fill in" missing data, which is clearly not true data recovery in any meaningful sense. I am aware of how advanced algorithms such as those used for flash memory today can "recover" data from imperfect probability distributions naturally created by NAND flash operation, but there seems to a huge gap between those, which are based on well-understood information-theoretic principles, and the AI techniques described here.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  related -- A Chinese woman, known by the pseudonym Zhemao, was found to have been rewriting and falsifying Russian history on Wikipedia for over a decade. She created over 200 detailed articles on the Chinese Wikipedia, which included fictitious states, battles, and aristocrats. The hoax was exposed when a Chinese novelist, Yifan, researching for a book, stumbled upon an article about the Kashin silver mine. Yifan noticed that the article contained extensive details that were not supported by other language versions of Wikipedia, including the Russian one. Zhemao, posing as a scholar, claimed to have a Ph.D. in world history from Moscow State University and was the daughter of a Chinese diplomat based in Russia. She used machine translation to understand Russian-language sources and filled in gaps with her own imagination. Her articles were well-crafted and included detailed references, making them appear credible. However, many of the sources cited were either fake or did not exist. The articles were eventually investigated by Wikipedia editors who found that Zhemao had used multiple “puppet accounts” to lend credibility to her edits. Following the investigation, Zhemao was banned from Chinese Wikipedia, and her edits were deleted.
fuzztester 2y ago
>How AI is I almost read it as "How Ali is" due to speed reading and the font in the original article. :) And now I wonder how AI would do on that same test :) Chat, GPT!
cormorant 2y ago
Does anyone have a subscription or can otherwise read past the heading "A flood of information"? (I can see ~2500 words but there is apparently more.)
- msephton 2y ago
  The easiest way is to perpend the URL with archive.is, as follows: https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-02...
  - Validark 2y ago
    It's cut off on archive.is too. Can Springer Nature not afford us all to be able to read the full article or what? Do they really need $70 for a single page of information again?
teleforce 2y ago
I hope we can decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's believed to be a valid linguistic script being used for writing system of the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages. [1] Indus script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Claude is all too willing to provide interpretations. Why not give it a go and see if you can’t crack it yourself? Hypothesis generation is needed!
Oarch 2y ago
What if the deciphered content is the ancient equivalent of Vogon poetry? Do we stop?
- Octoth0rpe 2y ago
  No, but the translation process would transfer from academia to the military industrial complex.
sans_souse 2y ago
This concerns me. How do we assess the AI's interpretation when it comes to what we ourselves can't see? Have we not learned that AI desparately wants to supply answers to the point it prioritizes answers over accuracy? We already lose enough in translation, and do well to twist those words we can discern - I'd really prefer we not start filling the gaps with lies formed of regurgitated data pools where it's most likely sourcing whatever fabricated fluff it does end up using to fill in said gaps.
- watt 2y ago
  why wouldn't you prefer _something_ over _nothing_. I assume AI steps in for issues that people haven't been able to begin to solve in decades.
  - xenospn 2y ago
    That _something_ could be worse than nothing.
  - Majestic121 2y ago
    It's much better to have _nothing_ than the wrong _something_, since with a wrong _something_ you build assumptions on wrong premises. Much better to accept that we don't know (hopefully temporarily), so that people can keep looking into it instead of falsely believing the problem is solved
  - davidclark 2y ago
    Absolutely prefer nothing here.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    I bet Heinrich Schliemann would have loved AI.
- palmfacehn 2y ago
  What is 'accuracy' when examined at depth? With the benefit of greater knowledge and context we are able to critique some of the answers provided by today's LLMs. With the benefit of hindsight we are able to see where past academics and thought leaders went wrong. This isn't the same as confirming that our own position is a zenith of understanding. It would be more reasonable to assume it is a false summit. Could we not also say that academics have a priority to "publish or perish"? When we use the benefits of hindsight to examine debunked theories, could we not also say that they were too eager to supply answers? I agree about models filling the gaps with whatever is most probable. That's what they are designed to do. My quibble is that humans often synthesize the least objectionable answers based on group-think, institutional norms and pure laziness.
starlite-5008 2y ago
[dead]
InsOp 2y ago
are there any news in the voynich code?
masfoobar 2y ago
Lets hope the AI tool being used does not convert to a particular religion and distorts ancient texts that challenges their beliefs, especially if it predates their "historically accurate" stories by hundreds or thousands of years. human - "Please compile these texts" AI - "done! Here you go" human - "114AD? Are you sure. We expect this to be around 100BC" AI - "NO! Nothing to see, here! Water turning into Wine was clearly added to this God AFTER our lord and saviour!" human - "But I have this thing.." AI - "NOTHING TO SEE, HERE! THEY WERE PLANTED TO TEST US! TEST US!" ... ... "BURN IT!"

204 points by Marceltan 2y ago

fredtalty5 2y ago

[dead]

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

(2024)

Tagbert 2y ago
:-)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

datavirtue 2y ago

Nothing to see here. LLMs and AI suck and aren't really good at anything. /s The world is about to change much faster than any of us have ever witnessed to this point. What a life.

muglug 2y ago
There’s a big difference between LLMs and this application of CNNs and RNNs. Very few people on HN are claiming there’s no value to neural networks — CNNs have been heralded here for well over a decade.
mcphage 2y ago
There are definitely things they’re good at. And there’s definitely things that they’re bad at, worse than nothing at all. The problem is how often they’re being used in the later case, and how rarely in the former.
zeofig 2y ago
Build a strawman, knock him down, and plant the glorious flag of hyperbole on his strawwy corpse.

mlepath 2y ago

This is a great application of various domains of ML. This reminds me of Vesuvius Challenge. This kid of thing is accessible to beginners too since the data by definition are pretty limitted.

jhanschoo 2y ago
Perhaps you missed it while skimming, but indeed, the Vesuvius Challenge is a primary topic of discussion in the article :)

adriand 2y ago

I find this incredibly exciting. There could be some truly remarkable works whose contents are about to be revealed, and we don’t really know what we might find. Histories of the ancient (more ancient) world. Accounts of contact with cultures and civilizations that are currently lost to history. Scientific and mathematical discoveries. And what I often find to be the most moving: stories of daily life that illuminate what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago.

Applejinx 2y ago
Which becomes a real gotcha when it turns out to be hallucinated 'content' misleading people into following their assumptions on what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago. What we call AI does have superhuman powers but they are not powers of insight, they are powers of generalization. AI is more capable than a human is of homogenizing experience down to what a current snapshot of 'human thought' would be, because it's by definition PEOPLE rather than 'person'. The effort to invoke a specific perspective from it (that seems ubiquitous) sees AI at its worst. This idea that you could use it to correctly extract a specific perspective from the long dead, is wildly, wildly misguided.

Sparkyte 2y ago

Can't wait to read ancient smutt from the time.

sapphicsnail 2y ago
I wouldn't call in smut but there are 5 surviving Greek novels and some Roman elegaic poetry that's a little horny. We know there used to be a lot of crazier stuff but it mostly doesn't survive.

mmooss 2y ago

There isn't much about accuracy: "Ithaca restored artificially produced gaps in ancient texts with 62% accuracy, compared with 25% for human experts. But experts aided by Ithaca’s suggestions had the best results of all, filling gaps with an accuracy of 72%. Ithaca also identified the geographical origins of inscriptions with 71% accuracy, and dated them to within 30 years of accepted estimates." and "[Using] an RNN to restore missing text from a series of 1,100 Mycenaean tablets ... written in a script called Linear B in the second millennium bc. In tests with artificially produced gaps, the model’s top ten predictions included the correct answer 72% of the time, and in real-world cases it often matched the suggestions of human specialists." Obviously 62%, 72%, 72% in ten tries, etc. is not sufficient by itself. How do scholars use these tools? Without some external source to verify the truth, you can't know if the software output is accurate. And if you have some reliable external source, you don't need the software. Obviously, they've thought of that, and it's worth experimenting with these powerful tools. But I wonder how they've solved that problem.

sapphicsnail 2y ago
> Obviously 62%, 72%, 72% in ten tries, etc. is not sufficient by itself. How do scholars use these tools? Without some external source to verify the truth, you can't know if the software output is accurate. And if you have some reliable external source, you don't need the software. Without an extant text to compare, everything would be a guess. Maybe this would be helpful if you're trying to get a rough and dirty translation of a bunch of papyri or inscriptions? Until we have an AI that's able to adequately explain it's reasoning I can't see this replacing philologists with domain-specific expertise who are able to walk you through the choices they made.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  I wonder if maybe the goal is to provide the actual scholars with options, approaches or translations they hadn't thought of yet. In essence just what you said, structured guessing, but if you can have a well-trained bot guess within specific bounds countless times and output the patterns in the guesses, maybe it would be enough. Not, "My AI translated this ancient fragment of text," but "My AI sent us in a direction we hadn't previously had the time or inclination to explore, which turned out to be fruitful."

zozbot234 2y ago

The really nice thing about this is that the AI can now acquire these newly-decoded texts as part of its training set, and begin learning at a geometric rate.

mistrial9 2y ago
errors in => errors out
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  Don't forget to spice it up with some bias! https://x.com/i/grok/share/uMwJwGkl2XVUep0N4ZPV1QUx6 https://x.com/i/grok/share/uMwJwGkl2XVUep0N4ZPV1QUx6
rzzzt 2y ago
But do I want to see ancient programming advice written in Linear B?
zeofig 2y ago
Why not just feed it random data? It's so smart that it will figure out which parts are random, so eventually you will generate some good data randomly, and it will feed on it, and become exponentially smarter exponentially fast.
- Validark 2y ago
  This is actually hilarious and I'm sad you are getting downvoted for it.
nitwit005 2y ago
With our current methods, feeding back even fairly small amounts of outputs back in as training data leads to declining performance. Just think of it abstractly. The AI will be trained on the errors the previous generation made. As long as it keeps making new errors each generation, they will tend to multiply.

taffronaut 2y ago

From TFA "decoding rare and lost languages of which hardly any traces survive". Assuming that's not hype, let's see it have a go at Rongorongo[1] then. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

nick238 2y ago
and Linear A [1]. To be fair, whatever model would require data about the context of where the texts were found unless the corpus is massive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
- shellfishgene 2y ago
  It's mentioned in the article that they hope the model for Linear B can also help with Linear A.

yzydserd 2y ago

Klaatu barada nikto

userbinator 2y ago

The full title is "How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history", and that second part is especially fitting, although unfortunately not mentioned in the article itself, which is full of rather horrifying stories about using AI to "fill in" missing data, which is clearly not true data recovery in any meaningful sense. I am aware of how advanced algorithms such as those used for flash memory today can "recover" data from imperfect probability distributions naturally created by NAND flash operation, but there seems to a huge gap between those, which are based on well-understood information-theoretic principles, and the AI techniques described here.

mistrial9 2y ago
related -- A Chinese woman, known by the pseudonym Zhemao, was found to have been rewriting and falsifying Russian history on Wikipedia for over a decade. She created over 200 detailed articles on the Chinese Wikipedia, which included fictitious states, battles, and aristocrats. The hoax was exposed when a Chinese novelist, Yifan, researching for a book, stumbled upon an article about the Kashin silver mine. Yifan noticed that the article contained extensive details that were not supported by other language versions of Wikipedia, including the Russian one. Zhemao, posing as a scholar, claimed to have a Ph.D. in world history from Moscow State University and was the daughter of a Chinese diplomat based in Russia. She used machine translation to understand Russian-language sources and filled in gaps with her own imagination. Her articles were well-crafted and included detailed references, making them appear credible. However, many of the sources cited were either fake or did not exist. The articles were eventually investigated by Wikipedia editors who found that Zhemao had used multiple “puppet accounts” to lend credibility to her edits. Following the investigation, Zhemao was banned from Chinese Wikipedia, and her edits were deleted.

fuzztester 2y ago

>How AI is I almost read it as "How Ali is" due to speed reading and the font in the original article. :) And now I wonder how AI would do on that same test :) Chat, GPT!

cormorant 2y ago

Does anyone have a subscription or can otherwise read past the heading "A flood of information"? (I can see ~2500 words but there is apparently more.)

msephton 2y ago
The easiest way is to perpend the URL with archive.is, as follows: https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z https://archive.is/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-02...
- Validark 2y ago
  It's cut off on archive.is too. Can Springer Nature not afford us all to be able to read the full article or what? Do they really need $70 for a single page of information again?

teleforce 2y ago

I hope we can decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's believed to be a valid linguistic script being used for writing system of the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages. [1] Indus script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

dr_dshiv 2y ago
Claude is all too willing to provide interpretations. Why not give it a go and see if you can’t crack it yourself? Hypothesis generation is needed!

Oarch 2y ago

What if the deciphered content is the ancient equivalent of Vogon poetry? Do we stop?

Octoth0rpe 2y ago
No, but the translation process would transfer from academia to the military industrial complex.

sans_souse 2y ago

This concerns me. How do we assess the AI's interpretation when it comes to what we ourselves can't see? Have we not learned that AI desparately wants to supply answers to the point it prioritizes answers over accuracy? We already lose enough in translation, and do well to twist those words we can discern - I'd really prefer we not start filling the gaps with lies formed of regurgitated data pools where it's most likely sourcing whatever fabricated fluff it does end up using to fill in said gaps.

watt 2y ago
why wouldn't you prefer _something_ over _nothing_. I assume AI steps in for issues that people haven't been able to begin to solve in decades.
- xenospn 2y ago
  That _something_ could be worse than nothing.
- Majestic121 2y ago
  It's much better to have _nothing_ than the wrong _something_, since with a wrong _something_ you build assumptions on wrong premises. Much better to accept that we don't know (hopefully temporarily), so that people can keep looking into it instead of falsely believing the problem is solved
- davidclark 2y ago
  Absolutely prefer nothing here.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  I bet Heinrich Schliemann would have loved AI.
palmfacehn 2y ago
What is 'accuracy' when examined at depth? With the benefit of greater knowledge and context we are able to critique some of the answers provided by today's LLMs. With the benefit of hindsight we are able to see where past academics and thought leaders went wrong. This isn't the same as confirming that our own position is a zenith of understanding. It would be more reasonable to assume it is a false summit. Could we not also say that academics have a priority to "publish or perish"? When we use the benefits of hindsight to examine debunked theories, could we not also say that they were too eager to supply answers? I agree about models filling the gaps with whatever is most probable. That's what they are designed to do. My quibble is that humans often synthesize the least objectionable answers based on group-think, institutional norms and pure laziness.

starlite-5008 2y ago

[dead]

InsOp 2y ago

are there any news in the voynich code?

masfoobar 2y ago

Lets hope the AI tool being used does not convert to a particular religion and distorts ancient texts that challenges their beliefs, especially if it predates their "historically accurate" stories by hundreds or thousands of years. human - "Please compile these texts" AI - "done! Here you go" human - "114AD? Are you sure. We expect this to be around 100BC" AI - "NO! Nothing to see, here! Water turning into Wine was clearly added to this God AFTER our lord and saviour!" human - "But I have this thing.." AI - "NOTHING TO SEE, HERE! THEY WERE PLANTED TO TEST US! TEST US!" ... ... "BURN IT!"