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AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

aiclambake.com

131–140 of 195 posts

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#131

If confirmed this is really cool and impressive work. Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert. Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readin…

I don’t imagine a model capable of the first part would require being told not to assume a decipherment is correct

Humans capable of the first part regularly make the mistake of assuming that their decipherment is correct even if it's not internally consistent and fails to adequately explain most of the data.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts, and there is an excerpt of the paper in my blog post. I have also seen and read the paper with my own 2 eyes, I can't publish it though, Tom wants to keep that under wraps while it's reviewed by linguistics experts.

> He has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts So did many of the previous attempted solvers.

One way to assess the validity of prior claims is to see how many words you can translate using their proposed system.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#137

Is 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.

Are there many uncracked languages out there?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#138
post #98

> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the pr…

If it had been a proper developer he would've been nerd-sniped into yak-shaving those tools and never get the original work done.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#139

As 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…

But Greek did distinguish aspirated and unaspirated P, just not in Linear B.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#140
post #138
post #98

> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the pr…

If it had been a proper developer he would've been nerd-sniped into yak-shaving those tools and never get the original work done.

you don't know that
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