AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#181

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

iwontberude wrote: post #179

ben_w wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually it’s the flattening of achievement to be some guy, Claude or a combination of both when really it was neither.

"Flattening of achievement" is true for the overwhelming majority of people named and revered for their genius. Shakespeare didn't invent many of his plot lines, Einstein used Lorentz' transform (amongst other things) etc.

As reported (I have no skin in this), Di Mino appears to have used Claude to write tool to perform statistical analysis to test an idea he had, and in such cases as this it seems to me fairer to praise the human using the machine than to praise a director for the films acted, filmed, written, and edited by others.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#182

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #163

Kosturdistan wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the agent ran the simulations or if the agent built software that ran the simulations. But Claude was used to run the simulations.

I feel like that is extremely relevant information. An LLM running "simulations" is nonsense, using an agent (apparently Claude Code) to write simulation software is more realistic. I'm sure you could clarify this since you have a relationship with the person. Curious to see where this goes. Hopefully an update is posted here when it's all said and done :)

[deleted]

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#183

Post by cake-rusk » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

_verandaguy wrote: post #15

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.

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.

Isn't this like the P vs NP problems? Once you have a solution it is easy to verify?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#184

Post by peterfirefly » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #156

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.

True, but Arabic and Hebrew use a large number of implicit vowels. Only some of the vowels are actually written (except in school books in the early grades).

I don't really understand how they can leave out so many vowels and still figure out that "this is past tense", "this is a noun", etc.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#185

Post by peterfirefly » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

petjuh wrote: post #180

peterfirefly wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I caught this guy's reddit posts on the subject . Someone was playing around with statistical analyses of a big Linear A corpus + some other corpora. There was an extremely clear signal that Linear A seemed to be much more similar to one other corpus than to the others. This was the first time I've ever heard of something that might* have been a good hint for decipherment. There's a Dutch professor emeritus (…

Ok, but Hurro-Urartian is an agglutinative language family that is an isolate and has nothing to do with Semitic.

There are two relevant decipherment ideas: the new one that is the first one sufficiently "un-bad" to be taken seriously and the one by the Dutch emeritus.

The Dutch guy thinks he can recognize some names (personal and toponyms) and that seems to be his main evidence for Linear A being Hurrian/Urartian. His theory doesn't seem very convincing (and his youtube videos are incredibly booooring).

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#186

Post by make3 » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

mikestorrent wrote: post #50

kridsdale1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment sure is load bearing.

It's the veritable smoking gun

I'd like to push back

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#187

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

But the idea that you only learn and write the consonants (that are like 20) istead of learning and writing all the sylabes deiferently (that are like 5×20) appeared much later. (It was a brillant idea, by the way.)

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#188

Post by _alternator_ » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

stratocumulus0 wrote: post #178

_alternator_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not saying that this is implausible, but this is one guess in a sea of many. We were shown a single word substitution with a claim that 300 others match, but no documentation of this person's research. We don't know this person's methodology beyond this single sentence. A naive approach would be to collect a thesaurus of Semitic roots and use automation such as an LLM to match those against instances of words. So…

Thank you for the truly excellent reply.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#189

Post by Slamwart » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

I am curious how the author analyzes other words that scholars have identified as forms of the same verb, which has generally been understood as "give": ta-na-i-301-u-ti-nu (IO Za 6), for instance, or a-ta-i-301-de-ka (ZA Zb 3). As Brent Davis has argued it sure does look like the root is i-*301 with prefixed and suffixed elements, rather than some trilateral n-w-y (also "dwell" and "give" are pretty far apart semantically). Accordingly I would be surprised if the idea that this is a Semitic language makes it through peer review, and leading with such a far-fetched claim doesn't inspire much confidence in the article or the idea that Linear A has been "cracked."

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#190

Post by mcswell » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

teleforce wrote: post #159

>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 f…

"...it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script..." No, it has NOT been proven to be a writing system for a language. Indeed the very link you cite [1] says:

"... difficult to judge whether or not they [the Indus symbols] constituted a writing system used to record a Harappan language..."

"There are doubts whether the Indus script records a written language or is instead a system of non-linguistic signs or proto-writing similar to merchant's marks and house marks, and to the contemporary accounting tokens and numerical clay tablets of Mesopotamia. Due to the brevity of inscriptions, some researchers have questioned whether Indus symbols can even express a spoken language."

In sum, whether it's a writing system for some language is still debated.