relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2151/
Wow, there really is an XKCD for everything.
AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
121–130 of 195 posts
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#122Earlier 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.
> 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.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
> Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better
My attempts at making bread have been too stochastic, in that it hardly ever produces nice results.
But yes. Eyeballing how much dried herbs to put in my dishes because I like what 2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol does for them. Usually it works, sometimes it's just a bit too Italian.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#124As 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…
There's actually at least one Greek word of Semitic derivation attested in Linear B https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kupirijo_in_museum.j... namely the island of Cyprus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%80%CF%81%CE%B... , whence also "copper." If the pre-Greek population of Crete was Semitic, there should be a lot more such loans, especially toponyms.
Speaking of Greek, Linear B and Semitic, the related Cypriot syllabary was deciphered thanks to a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idalion_bilingual And just as in Crete, there is an undeciphered pre-Greek language written in the same script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eteocypriot_language
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 g…
> Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better My attempts at making bread have been too stochastic, in that it hardly ever produces nice results. But yes. Eyeballing how much dried herbs to put in my dishes because I like what 2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol does for them. Usually it works, sometimes it's just a bit too Italian.
Might not be the amount, you may have not controlled for humidity or temperature (wink wink), or just that the timer on your oven is off by one minute per every ten minutes, and its bang-bang thermostat never actually reaches the temperature you set on the panel, and...
... in some sense, it's a miracle most people deal with this kind of bullshit without complaining much.
(Probably because they don't realize it's something to complain about. It's just how things are.)
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#126If 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 probably old news for most but in the last 15 years it became clear that Europe was completely resettled, once by Anatolians and then partly by Indo-Europeans. The language of the Anatolians is still unknown.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#127Earlier 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
#128Wait, I've seen the same libation formula appearing in the Phaistos disc. For those 10 of you who have the fonts installed:
𐇑 𐇘 𐇪 𐇐 | 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇬 𐇗 𐇜 | 𐇬 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇪 𐇱 𐇦 𐇨 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇖 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 i-𐇘-wi-jeʳ | ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ au-no-pa au-ndi-tiʳ 𐇥-au-ni-ti-noʳ wa-pi-naᵐwa ti-ru-te ti-nd-tri ti-na-ru-he ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ i-301-wa-ja/e | ʰau-... jaᵘ-di-ki-to i-pi-na-ma si-ru-te ta-na-ra te-ti-u ta-na-te i-da 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘮 WA 𐘱 JA 𐘱 JA 𐘆 DI 𐘸 KI 𐘹 TU 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘢 PI 𐘅 NA 𐙁 MA ()
I believe the phonetic values for Phaistos here were based on similarity.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#129As 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…
There's actually at least one Greek word of Semitic derivation attested in Linear B https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kupirijo_in_museum.j... namely the island of Cyprus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%80%CF%81%CE%B... , whence also "copper." If the pre-Greek population of Crete was Semitic, there should be a lot more such loans, especially toponyms. Speaking of Greek, Linear B and Semitic, the r…
I'm not an expert on linguistics, but I will say that Crete at that time was polylingual. No one is saying that everyone on the island spoke this Minoan semitic language; only the semitic people on the island, and it was a diverse population.
Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does an expert even verify something like this?
Linear A/B testing?