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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

#151

Post by canjobear »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #2

A 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…

> Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge

What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#152

Post by canjobear »

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 can evaluate the logic for the decipherment step by step and make sure all the claims are justified. But the best test is to try the proposed decipherment against some new text and see if it makes sense. In the case of Linear A and the other remaining undeciphered scripts, there's not a lot of held-out text to test against, so it's tricky.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#153

Post by blackqueeriroh »

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.

I’m confused; do you actually believe a large language model named “Claude” went out and hoovered up all the information about this Minoan problem?

If not, how did “Claude” steal anything?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#154

Post by mcswell »

stratocumulus0 wrote: post #38

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…

"...syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P." Given that aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops were almost certainly distinguished in spoken Greek of the time (as they were in proto-IndoEuropean and in later classical Greek), why would the Greeks not have carried over such a distinction if it existed in the Linear A language? It seems much more likely that the distinction did not exist in the Linear A language or script, and that's why it didn't show up in Linear B.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#155

Post by mcswell »

cwmma wrote: post #73
_kst_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it comes up in the Gospels, too, e.g. "on the third day" after the resurrection.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#156

Post by mcswell »

petjuh wrote: post #145

From what I know, the main issue is that the Linear A script corpus is rather small. Another commenter here said it's only 7500 symbols in total, spread around 1500 inscriptions (so on average 5 symbols per inscription). The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would h…

Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#157

Post by mcswell »

singularity2001 wrote: post #126

If it turns out to be true, it would open the door a bit for connecting Indo-European languages with Semitic languages. In the beginning of the last century it was believed that these were related. Later this came out of vogue. How could they have been so wrong initially? Because both languages families were entangled, as now there is genetic evidence that both languages spread from very close to the Caucasus. It's p…

"How could they have been so wrong initially?" For the same reason that many other proposed reconstructions were (and some still are) so wrong. Chance matches, sometimes actual loanwords, and bias on the part of some people.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#158

Post by qustio »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #132
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #122

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 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.

But the entire corpus for Linear A is tiny, you could backfill a "translation" that has no actual similarity with the real language when properly tested against novel examples. How was this tested?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#159

Post by teleforce »

>Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.

Indus valley script is about 1500 years earlier than Linear A and I hope we can also decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script believed to be being used for writing system the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages for examples Telegus and Tamil.

The main reason it's very difficult to decipher is that there's no equivalent Rosetta Stone for Indus script. My hypothesis is that the AI LLM model can be trained or tuned as the logical or virtual version of the venerable Rosetta stone hence can be used to decipher ancient writing system.

[1] Indus script:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#160

Post by qustio »

ahknight wrote: post #111
Kosturdistan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen and read his draft article, he's not comfortable sharing it publicly yet since it's being reviewed by experts.

But the Internet nerds wish to blindly judge something they know nothing about so they can feel better with the assumption that they could have done better somehow. How will they be appeased if the document they will say they have read and understood (without having done either) is not available to point at? How, I ask?!

It's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny.

Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics.

None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.

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