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AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

aiclambake.com

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Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#41

Post by iwontberude »

ben_w wrote: post #37
iwontberude wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What thunder? Claude did the work and used a human to interface with experience and causality better.

The thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review. One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.

I exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#42

Post by WithinReason »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #35

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

As observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#43

Post by dehrmann »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #35

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

Very vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#44

Post by stringfood »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #35

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

when I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#45

Post by kridsdale1 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #19
kubb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's wait until it's been verified.

You're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight!

This comment sure is load bearing.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#46

Post by fooster »

Alot of the comments in this thread are disappointing. Rather that celebrating an achievement (whether or it is validated yet), many of you seem to want to put him down, or make it seem like claude did all the work.

Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.

What a shame.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#47

Post by ben_w »

iwontberude wrote: post #41
ben_w wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review. One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.

I exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.

> Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.

No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date.

To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from. To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#48

Post by loudmax »

This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment.

To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.

But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#49

Post by _verandaguy »

fragmede wrote: post #29
_verandaguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

All things aside, I think this misses the forest for the trees on the halting problem.

It's not about being able to throw claude or codex at a loop and having it evaluate it for halting, it's about being able to do this for arbitrary code. Computer science rigourously defines the halting problem as not computable and undecidable. within the framework of using something akin to static analysis using any deterministic Turing machine.

There's not really a question of "solving" the halting problem like there's some as-yet unknown way of generally figuring out if arbitraty code halts. Turing proposed a proof in 1937 in favour of undecidability of what we now know as the halting problem, building on ideas first articulated by Church a few years prior.

Frankly, if anything, it's reasonable to say that the halting problem's been solved, just in the direction of undecidability rather than decidability.

Anyway, back to LLMs; as code gets more complex, the robot will need a bigger context window, more hardware resources, and more time, all of which will be variable due to the noise inherent in the system. It'll be difficult to put a useful upper and lower bound on how much computing power and time it'll take to figure out if a program ever halts. Which is all a bit moot, frankly, in the context of halting, but useful to keep in mind in the more general context of using these things as analysis tools.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#50

Post by mikestorrent »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #45
mikestorrent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight!

This comment sure is load bearing.

It's the veritable smoking gun
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