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AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

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Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#141

Post by neonstatic »

humodz wrote: post #70
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills

Imagine if the first archeological discovery they made was tax forms from different countries. What would they think of us, haha.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#143

Post by evilfred »

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.

of course we have no way to assess this claim as there is no public software or paper to review

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#144

Post by a_e_k »

retrac wrote: post #40
OutOfHere wrote: post #11

Is this extendible to a generalizable approach to translate any language pair (without a translation map or translation dataset)?

I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual. It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language wr…

Off topic, but that photo is amazing, and got a good laugh out of me. It definitely falls in the "pets and owners who look alike" category.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#145

Post by petjuh »

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 have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard.

Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words.

Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words:

kataba – He wrote yaktubu – He writes / is writing kitāb – A book kutub – Books kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk maktūb – Written / fate maktab – An office / desk maktabah – A library / bookstore

And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning."

darasa – He studied yadrusu – He studies / is studying dirāsah – A study / school course dāris – A student / learner madrūs – Studied / carefully planned madrasah – A school

This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#146

Post by peterfirefly »

_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.

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 (in linguistics) who claims it is Hurrian-Urartian and he's been posting youtube videos about his "decipherment" but he didn't seem too convincing to me.

Claude helped write code to read and parse the corpora and to do some fairly basic statistical analysis along the lines of "which Linear A symbols most often occur together" and "if we use known Linear B sound values, which of the other corpora most often have vowel similarities with the Linear A corpus".

You can write that code yourself or you can ask an LLVM to write it for you. The provenience of the code isn't important.

*) He later deleted some of them, I think. What was still there on reddit a few weeks ago had dead links to a web site of his with statistical tables and I believe also code.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#147

Post by tadfisher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #116
ben_w wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

There are too many value judgments in this post. You can "cook" like "regular people" do, and be completely serious, and apply chemical and physical knowledge in doing so, and test the output for quality; generally that's what restaurant chefs do. It doesn't make sense to cook like you're tooling an assembly line, because you aren't cost-optimizing and packaging a product that needs to sit on a store shelf for weeks, months, or years while maintaining its desired qualities.

Speaking generally, food produced though "chemical process engineering" (a.k.a. factories) must compromise on many axes, one of them being nutritional content. We intuitively do not care about several of these dimensions when cooking food with fresh ingredients, at least not at the scale of, say, Kellogg's or General Mills.

Maybe that's evidence of accepting a stochastic process in our daily lives, but you're kind of selling the tradition and science of cooking short when you argue that factory-produced food is a "more serious approach".

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#148

Post by topaz0 »

xeonmc wrote: post #138
simonw wrote: post #98

> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the pr…

If it had been a proper developer he would've been nerd-sniped into yak-shaving those tools and never get the original work done.

If you look at his GitHub it does seem like he's obsessed with the tools

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#149

Post by fooster »

evilfred wrote: post #88
fooster wrote: post #46

Alot 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

"amateur crank claiming"

I don't know why you want to stoop to name calling which violates the guidelines and the spirit of this site.

"without any critical review" is also seemingly untrue: the post says Rutgers and Cambridge are reviewing it

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#150

Post by baq »

kubb wrote: post #8
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…

Let's wait until it's been verified.

You’re right to push back.
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