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They haven't unlocked anything. At best, they've gained confidence in the type of lock. The title on the site is bad ("unlock more secrets of ancient script"),
by ggruschow 17y ago
They haven't unlocked anything. At best, they've gained confidence in the type of lock.
The title on the site is bad ("unlock more secrets of ancient script"), especially for a place called "science daily". The title here is atrocious. The end of the first paragraph is "researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script."
- jimmybot 17y agoAgree about the bad title; but it does resolve an important question, which was whether the script was a language at all. Establishing that it has the regularities of human language was a necessary first step. Here's another interesting example. The Luwian script's directionality couldn't be established. It was not certain whether it was up-down, up-down or up-down, down-up or various possibilities. This paper established using Expectation-Maximization the correct order of reading for the script: Discovering the linear writing order of a two-dimensional ancient hieroglyphic script http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~sdlin/publications.html http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~sdlin/publications.html Luwian script: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyphic_Luwian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyphic_Luwian
- jongraehl 17y ago> "One of the main purposes of our paper is to introduce Markov models, and statistical models in general, as computational tools for investigating ancient scripts," Adhikari said. This is bogus. (Hidden) Markov Models and other generative probabilistic models have been used in all kinds of decipherment for years - see the latter half of http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/naacl09-print-1x2.pdf http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/naacl09-print-1x2... for an overview.