Interesting writeup. Would be nice to have a couple images of Linear A/B scripts to visualize. Looking on google, they're very daunting!
lineara.xyz is your friend
AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
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Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#72This 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 a…
Thanks, I hope Tom is right, but now it's in the hands of the pros.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations. Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
They hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.
Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#74I wonder how you would even know if you have “cracked” it, given the corpus is so small?
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#75would like to hear more about Tom's learning/education path in ML/AI.
I haven't talked to him extensively about how he learned his engineering skills, but he is I believe 100% self taught. His background is in copywriting.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#76Is this extendible to a generalizable approach to translate any language pair (without a translation map or translation dataset)?
Tom thinks he may be able to use his approach to crack more languages, but that's not confirmed.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#77Sorry 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.
I drilled down on this with Tom. He thinks that it might not have happened without Claude Code, but Claude was used to organize all of the symbols, and to run I think it was 100,000 simulations to assess whether or not he had an actual insight, or if he just randomly got lucky. Claude did NOT crack the code. Significant supporting role though.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's wait until it's been verified.
How does an expert even verify something like this?
I mean it's not like anyone could objectively go back in time and query ancient civilizations for what they meant, but presumably it means the verification heuristics, they have currently, pragmatic success, and expert solidarity means that it is "verified"
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#79The 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.
I wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy?
Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#80As an amateur who's been fascinated by this puzzle himself, I will add some context that might be relevant in assessing the plausibility of this claim: - The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handf…
Thanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?