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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

#161

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

That's one of the reasons. Another, and more important one, is that we don't know the language that the script transcribes. The claim above is that it's Hebrew.

I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier to harder:

a) We know what language the script transcribes and how the script transcribes it (e.g. what symbol means what word or sound).

b1) We don't what language the script transcribes but we know how the script transcribes it (e.g. it's a syllabary or an abjad etc).

b2) We know what language the script transcribes but we don't know how the script transcribes it (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics).

c) We don't know what language the script transcribes nor do we know how it transcribes it.

b1) and b2) are more or less of similar difficulty.

Linear A goes to category c) above. We know next to nothing about the script or the language, other than the fact the former was reused in linear B to transcribe Mycenean Greek.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#162

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

"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

The post says so. What do Rutgers and Cambridge say though?

My following searches turn out no announcements by either Rutgers or Cambridge:

"rutgers linguists evaluate deciphering of linear a by tom di mino"

https://www.google.com/search?q=rutgers+linguists+evaluate+d...

https://www.google.com/search?q=cambridge+linguists+evaluate...

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 :)

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#164
The author and their friend are in the thread so I'll try to not be mean.

Caveat: I'm Greek so a kind of natural amateur historian. That is to say I grew up reading about the prehistory and ancient history of Greece, as one does when one is born Greek and a geek. I've seen the Phaistos disk and linear A inscriptions with mine own eyes in Greek museums and I have dreamed of the day they would be translated. I am not at all unsympathetic to the hopes of a Linear A decipherement.

However. The claimed decipherment has all the hallmarks of imaginative and fanciful attempts to draw parallels between historical events and entities, that were not really connected, many of them notably inspired by the Hebrew bible. For example, remember when the lost tribes of Israel turned out in the New World [1]? Or how Biblical Sodom was actually destroyed by a comet [2]? Or the time that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and caused the Biblical Cataclysm [3]? Or, for less biblical but no less foundational texts of the Western literary canon, remember when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the Jewels of Helen of Troy [4] and the Death Mask of King Agamemnon [5]?

Or of course we could recall any of the claims to decipher the Phaistos Disk [6] or the Dropa Disks from Bayan Kara-Ula [7], and so on I'm sure.

All of the above is not to say that a decipherement is impossible. What it is to say is that it currently isn't possible; because we have no idea what the language that Linear A transcribes even is. It's not like the Minoan language is still spoken today in some far-evolved form, as was the case for e.g. Egyptian or Mayan or indeed ancient Greek [8]. So we have an unknown script, writing an unknown language, and to make matters worse there are no parallel texts with another ancient language that might help us bridge the gap. What there is, is some rudimentary understanding of the more obvious contents of Linear A texts (mostly, lists of goods) and the fact that some Linear A symbols have been reused in Linear B.

But, how were they reused? And what good is that knowledge without knowing anything about the language transcribed by Linear A? I can read German, a language that I don't speak, because I can read Latin script, but the meaning of the script might as well be Greek to me [9].

I'm a computer scientists, I guess, these days [10]. The problem of deciphering Linear A, or the Phaistos Disk, or any other script (that may not even be a script) that transliterates a language that we don't know is a problem of reconstructing information that we don't have, from other information that we don't have. I'm not saying it's completely impossible. I mean, who knows? Maybe we're just missing the right maths. But, what we're really trying to do here is de-noise a message garbled by the passage of time without even a guess as to the language the message is written in. Claude Shannon would tell you that it's a fantasy that is not worth pursuing. You don't have to ask him, you can just read his magnum opus [11] and check out Section 3 titled "The Series of Approximations to English" for an idea of what the mechanics of deciphering a script when the language is known look like with the only technology we have that can do the job reliably.

When Turing and the other Brits at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, they at least knew it was, ultimately, a coded form of German. We may have a lot more compute now, and much more advanced tech overall, but there are some barriers that you cannot physically cross, no matter what resources you have. For example, you can't go faster than light and you can't escape the event horizon of a black hole. In the same way you can't translate text written in an unknown script, encoding an unknown language, without any parallel texts with a known language. There is just not enough information to do the job. Worse, if you try, you can endlessly come up with plausible "translations" and convince yourself that you have the right one, but you have no way to know you do.

I'm sorry but this claim is just a wild guess trying to link Hebrew to Linear A, without any serious evidence that the two are linked and without any evidence that the link is real, other than "look, I can guess what all the texts say!".

_________________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_decipherment_cla...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones

[8] I can read ancient Greek. The further back in time it goes, the harder it gets to understand what it means but I can still read the script. It has changed in 5000 years but not enough that I can't read it. Nothing like that ability survived for Linear A. I blame Thera.

[9] Except of course then I would understand it. But it's just German to me.

[10] I can assure you that took me by surprised, first of all.

[11] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#166
post #124

As 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…

The name of Cyprus being of semitic origin is probably easy to hand-wave away as the result of trade.

I'd like to offer some evidence that the people of Crete were of Greek origin and therefore Indo-European rather than semitic, unfortunately all the scholarship I can find on the subject is from Greek scholars and since it confirms that the Minoans are genetically related to modern Greeks, the more I hear of that evidence the less I am convinced by it. Because it's exactly consistent with confirmation bias. So I would not be surprised if the Minoans turned out to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Except of course we know those turned up in the Americas so they can't be the Minoans.

Yeah it's a joke. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory

The serious bit is that as soon as you make claims about who is from where and connected to what ancient people, you lose. It's impossible to disentangle peoples' nationalism and identity politics from whatever facts. I'm speaking in this as a Greek myself. Did you know that the Greek language is not, actually, an Indo-European language, but predates it by severeral hundreds of thousands of years, and has influenced every language you can find on every continent, including but not limited to the languages of the pre-Columbian civilisations? True story. Evidence: plenty! Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xochicalco Obviously that is the temple of the Goddess Kali in the country side ("Ο ναός της Θεάς Κάλι στην Εξοχή". Εξοχή-Κάλι-κο, Ξοχικάλκο!). I have actually read that in a book someone handed to me when I was a teenager. I had to put the book down after that.

tl;dr people get really crazy when it comes to their ancient history and lose the ability to think straight and derive sound conclusions from facts.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#167

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

That's one of the reasons. Another, and more important one, is that we don't know the language that the script transcribes. The claim above is that it's Hebrew. I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier…

Semitic, not Hebrew. Hebrew is one language in the semitic group, alongside Arabic, Amharic and many more. They were much more spread out in the west before the iron age, with most people in Asia Minor belonging to the group. Some of the earliest states used the languages, and they spread alongside the idea of states.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

After reading too many post in HN I got two conclusions:

1) Many preprints are bad, incredible bad. I read a lot of posts about ivermectine during 2020 and the errors were obvious. Like no control groups, the control group is a bunch of unrelated guys in another city, and a weird articles that split the 20+20 cases in 10 bins with 2+2 cases in each. They had a lot of error that were easy to spot without being a medical doctor. (Ctrl+F exclusions, you may get a surprise.) (And don't get me started with Chlorine Dioxide.)

2) Perpetual mobile and mass less drive reappear every few years. I definetively can read most of them. The most interesting part is the totally broken explanation of why this new version does not break the laws of physics.

3) HN has a lot of users specialized in niche topic. A few weeks ago I wrote a comment with a joke: "the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin" (for example v->f and w->v and a few more). Someone was surprised because s/he knows that German has more phonemes than English that has more phonemes than Spanish. There is someone wandering here that really knows about phonetics.

So, I want to see a preprint. Perhaps I can read it, perhaps someone else can read it, perhaps we have to wait a few days until someone writes a nice blog post and debunks it, perhaps it's correct.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#170
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…

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