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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

#111

Post by ahknight »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #99
Sniffnoy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?!

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#112

Post by [deleted] »

fragmede wrote: post #29
_verandaguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when ru…

[deleted]

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#114

Post by bazoom42 »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #103
bazoom42 wrote: post #74

I 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.

Not questioning the particular finding, just wondering in general. E.g when linear B or hieroglyphs were cracked, you could check angainst other untranslated texts and see if the translation still made sense.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

ben_w wrote: post #94
TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stochastic system Every day when you lower your butt onto your chair, you trust a stochastic system enough to assume you'll rest on the chair safely and not spontaneously phase through, which would lead to rather gory and painful terminal experience. Physics at macro scale is stochastic, which is a good reminder that stochastic != uniformly random. Expected distributions matter.

While strictly true, QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro for things like bums and chairs. IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.

> QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro for things like bums and chairs

I was going to segue into thermodynamics as a backup example, but you made me think of something better.

> IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.

How about, more specifically, food manufacturing? Or maybe, let's talk about cooking?

Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better - the better version is called "chemical process engineering", it's what cooking looks like when you care about quality and consistency of output, and can afford the equipment and process actually necessary for it. Regular people don't (i.e. neither care, nor can afford) - we call this cooking. It's an art, not a science, and people not only do it, but love it, and tie their identities to it, and build businesses around it, and a culture that embraces all the compromises (and calls the more serious approach "unhealthy").

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#117

Post by Kosturdistan »

BretonForearm wrote: post #86
Kosturdistan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#118

Post by evilfred »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #106
evilfred wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the info provided is completely unverifiable.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#119

Post by [deleted] »

BretonForearm wrote: post #86
Kosturdistan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#120

Post by atdt »

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.

You're incorrect. The letter ו (vav) is pronounced /v/ in modern Hebrew but /w/ in Biblical Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages, which is why the letter is referred to as Waw and transliterated as 'W'.

https://www.biblexika.com/bible-lexicon/navah-h5115

https://hebrew-academy.org.il/%D7%93%D7%A3-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9...

https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5116.htm

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