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X-ray scans reveal Buddhist prayers inside tiny Tibetan scrolls
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- mkmk 1y agoWonderful and reminiscent of the Vesuvius Prize [0], of course. Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve. [0] https://scrollprize.org/ https://scrollprize.org/
- stavros 1y agoIt makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it.
- neom 1y agoTangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA
- verditelabs 1y agoI am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- s0rce 1y agoSmall nitpick and they got it right in the next sentence but "3D X-ray topographical scanner" should be tomographic not topographic. X-ray topography is something else unrelated.
- evrennetwork 1y ago[dead]
- mkw5053 1y agoVery cool! I was just going down a rabbit hole yesterday about the use of AI techniques (or lack of success) in deciphering still-forgotten languages. Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’. The most promising direction now seems to be hybrid pipelines that combine vision encoders to normalize glyphs with constrained decoders guided by phonotactic priors. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06718 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06718 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06262 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06262
- jahsome 1y agoHow fascinating: in a paragraph entirely _about_ language, written entirely in my first language, I can barely recognize a fair chunk of the terms.
- mkw5053 1y agoHa, fair point! Let me try again :) People have tried using modern AI to crack lost languages. In some cases it works a bit. For example, a model learned to match Ugaritic (an ancient Semitic language) to Hebrew with no “dictionary” at all. In another case, a system called Pythia can guess missing letters in damaged Greek inscriptions with higher accuracy than human experts. But with truly lost scripts like Linear A or Proto-Elamite, we run into two problems: there are only a few hundred very short texts, and we don’t have any bilingual “Rosetta Stone” to anchor them. AI can spot patterns, cluster symbols, and even suggest likely word boundaries, but it cannot yet produce actual translations. The current hope is to combine image recognition (to clean up messy symbols) with language models guided by rules of possible sound systems, then loop in human experts to check or reject the guesses.
- jahsome 1y agoThanks so much for the added detail and context. I hope I didn't come off derisive! I really do find it fascinating language is so complex a "thing" I could spend 40 years learning English, and still find myself frequently feeling like a complete noob.
- laex 1y agohard to gauge significance without carbon dating of the scrolls. Why leave that out ?
- deadbabe 1y agoIf we are the ones who can read the prayers, maybe it’s because we’re the ones meant to answer them.
- HexPhantom 1y agoThere's something poetic about modern tech being used to uncover ancient hopes and intentions
- HexPhantom 1y agoWild that they found Sanskrit grammar in a Tibetan mantra. Just goes to show how fluid and interconnected these traditions really were
- blackoil 1y agoConsidering Buddhism's origin it isn't that surprising.
- Frummy 1y agoI bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently.
- Almondsetat 1y agoEven if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?
- npteljes 1y agoAll depends on the prayer quota. If one can do "9 000 000 mantras per minute" easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life.
- N_Lens 1y agoJust a ritual, the design is Very Human!
- moomoo11 1y agoMan searching for God is like a hacker trying to find super user on some remote system. Turns out someone else made both :P
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoThis feels like one of the quotes that needs to be quoted and I would quote you if I can understand what you mean by "turns out someone else made both" as maybe its me who didn't get its meaning (so can you please explain what you mean by this? thanks in advance!)
- bux93 1y agoAt least this time it's not an entire Buddhist monk. https://web.archive.org/web/20241119222821/http://www.history.com/news/ct-scan-reveals-mummified-monk-inside-ancient-buddha-statue https://web.archive.org/web/20241119222821/http://www.histor...
- faangguyindia 1y agoMy parents moved from Tibet to India, recetly I learned the ancient art of 'Tummo.' I never realized I had a natural 'high altitude adaptation' until I went on a trip with a group of foreigners and people from India. It was an eye-opening moment when I saw firsthand the difficulty they had with stamina at high altitudes. Stuff like this is super fascinating for me.
- akshitgaur2005 1y agohah same for me as a pahadi
- IFC_LLC 1y agoThe title of this article confuses me on many levels and layers.