Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.
somehow I suspect it was a bit more involved than: Claude, please solve Linear A.
You also have to add "make no mistakes"!
AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
21–30 of 195 posts
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#22relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2151/
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#23A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and…
Amazing work and refreshing to see a well written and cogent post to summarise it. Would love to hear more about how he used Claude to help solve the puzzle.
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Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#24Is this extendible to a generalizable approach to translate any language pair (without a translation map or translation dataset)?
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Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#25A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and…
You know him socially but is there a reason you’re writing this rather than him? It looks like he has his own web presence.
Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#26A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and…
You know him socially but is there a reason you’re writing this rather than him? It looks like he has his own web presence. Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
Isn't it customary for the author of a post shared on HN to leave a comment on the thread?
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.
This isn't really a reasonable approach, is it? The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
> even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs.
When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#28Sorry but I don’t recognize this as being an achievement by an amateur. This dude had no chance in hell until we trained a model to use his time to suss it out.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.
This isn't really a reasonable approach, is it? The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
Sure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when run on Tuesday? There's the computer science definition of determinism and the engineering result of "does it work", which are at odds. It's like the halting problem. We haven't solved the computer science definition of the halting problem, but give some C code with a loop that won't terminate to Claude, and it'll call that out as not halting.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#30Is this extendible to a generalizable approach to translate any language pair (without a translation map or translation dataset)?
Towards the Star Trek universal translator.....