Isn't a big problem with Linear A that there are so few symbols you can "solve" it relatively straightforwardly with no way to tell if you it's correct or not?
The lack of discovered inscriptions does make deciphering it harder, but it is possible!
AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
101–110 of 195 posts
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#102Earlier 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 noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#103I wonder how you would even know if you have “cracked” it, given the corpus is so small?
You know you have cracked it because using the proposed system you are able to translate the uncracked language. Also helpful if your proposed system for Linear A makes sense relative to related languages that are not Linear A. Tom's proposed phonetic values work for more than one language.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#104As 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…
Ciao. I'm Tom di Mino, and I'm on vacation in Bellingham, Washington right now. I'll get back to you later with a formal response. I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
Always glad to exchange! I'm a software engineer and a hobby linguist only myself, so don't expect wonders from me. But this is a fun topic to research for sure.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's wait until it's been verified.
How does an expert even verify something like this?
They verified Linear B against a new tablet that turned up in a dig after the Kober/Ventris* solution had been published. It had pictures of jars with no or one or two handles, and the claimed Linear B for "two handled jar" and such next to the correct picture.
* Ventris' publication, but given Kober's contribution to the work they should really share equal credit. I like to think Kober would have got there on her own if she had access to the larger corpus that Ventris had (the Pylos tablets) and a comparable amount of free time and money available.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#106Alot 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
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.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#107As 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…
Ciao. I'm Tom di Mino, and I'm on vacation in Bellingham, Washington right now. I'll get back to you later with a formal response. I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
Tom has entered the chat!
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#108Earlier 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.
ku-ro obviously means "carry in" :)
My French teacher told me a story of a Norwegian man who married a French woman. A few months after she'd moved to Norway, my French teacher had come to visit thrm.
When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?
Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.
It means (carrier) bag.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's wait until it's been verified.
I agree. The post has too few information. Also >> reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Here in Argentina, near 2005, we had like 5 guys that claimed to have 5 independent solutions of the Goldbach Conjeture. Each one got a PhD student that volunteer to read it, discussed the obvious problems with the author, tried to help to solve them and after a few months of back and forth they concluded that…
Skepticism is appropriate until the experts bless the work. I will point out however that all of the words Tom has translated provide strong support for his proposed phonetic values. And that's why I published the information prior to confirmation, along with the appropriate caveats.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#110i'm gonna write a blog post now about how my buddy discovered cold fusion and will have a paper out real soon now
/r/classics thinks this is bunk btw https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/s/wwiNTytNfA