Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

aiclambake.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 195 posts

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#81

Post by kps »

_kst_ wrote: post #58
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#82

Post by timschmidt »

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.

Everything is a Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

Either all information is stolen, or none is. Can't have it both ways.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#83

Post by Sniffnoy »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #61
yorwba wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is there no link to the actual write-up?

The only write-up at the moment is my blog post, hopefully that changes in the coming weeks.

The blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#84

Post by elbasti »

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.

I would love to have this image available!

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#85

Post by tclancy »

elbasti wrote: post #84
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.

I would love to have this image available!

I’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#86

Post by BretonForearm »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #77
iwontberude wrote: post #28

Sorry 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.

So Claude Code was used to generate software that ran simulations? I don't think LLMs in and of themselves can execute simulations, esp. a specific, non-single digit count like 100k.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#87

Post by drcode »

doubleorseven wrote: post #36

crossing my fingers for this guy. however, nawaya or what ever examples around it are not part of the Hebrew language.

Don't know about the situation for this particular example, but keep in mind this type of analysis will necessarily involve extremely archaic dialects of all the involved languages

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#88

Post by evilfred »

fooster wrote: post #46

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'…

this isn't an achievement, it's yet another amateur crank claiming he solved a famous puzzle, without a paper and without any critical review. many people have claimed to decode Linear A before. just because this guy used an LLM doesn't make it more credible

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#90

Post by Kosturdistan »

bawolff wrote: post #68
kubb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's wait until it's been verified.

How does an expert even verify something like this?

You look at the proposed sound values and compare it to other known languages. Languages from the same family share grammar and vocabulary.
Post reply on HN