Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

aiclambake.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 195 posts

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#171

Post by evilfred »

fooster wrote: post #149
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

"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

who at Rutgers and Cambridge? did he just email some random linguistics profs? why not classics? and did they respond out of genuine interest or just trying to let an enthusiastic amateur down gently?

i am sorry but "crank" is the correct term for the many amateurs who routinely email mathematicians, physicists, and apparently linguists with their special theories without having any academic experience in the field. for every anecdote where it panned out there are thousands of cases where it did not.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#172

Post by evilfred »

Kosturdistan wrote: post #109
gus_massa wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

he has apparently translated one word according to the only documentation we have. "my untrained amateur friend with no experience in the field has solved a hundreds of years old puzzle. no, trust me!" gets old real quick.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#173

Post by evilfred »

qustio wrote: post #160
ahknight wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

It's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny. Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the A…

exactly, thank you

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#174

Post by em-bee »

singularity2001 wrote: post #128

Wait, 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 had the fonts for the phaistos disk but not linear a. i have no idea why i had that one even installed, but now i have both :-) only that last character (󲎘) is still missing. which font is that?

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#175

Post by stratocumulus0 »

mcswell wrote: post #154
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #38

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…

"...syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P." Given that aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops were almost certainly distinguished in spoken Greek of the time (as they were in proto-IndoEuropean and in later classical Greek), why would the Greeks not have carried over such a distinction if it existed in the Linear A language? It seems much mo…

True, I did not think of the pi/phi distinction when writing this. There are other quirks exclusive to Linear B that don't occur in Linear A though, such as three different ways to write the phoneme "A" with no clear pattern on when is which one used.

With regard to the origin of the script, Linear A documents have been dated to earlier times than Linear B. And then, there is also an even earlier hieroglyphic script, but its relation to Linear A has not been established.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#177

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #167
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right of course but the article above is unclear about whether the claim is that Linear A transcribes Hebrew or a different Semitic language.

First it says that the language of Linear A is a semitic language that is a precursor to biblical Hebrew:

>> Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.

But then it compares the Linear A language directly to Hebrew. For example:

>> Once deciphered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was similar to subsequent Hebrew prayers but was addressed to a Goddess.

So maybe I'm confused. The claim that the Minoans spoke a semitic language sounds less odd than claiming they spoke straight-up biblical Hebrew.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#178

Post by stratocumulus0 »

_alternator_ wrote: post #80
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #38

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…

Thanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?

I'm not saying that this is implausible, but this is one guess in a sea of many. We were shown a single word substitution with a claim that 300 others match, but no documentation of this person's research. We don't know this person's methodology beyond this single sentence. A naive approach would be to collect a thesaurus of Semitic roots and use automation such as an LLM to match those against instances of words. Sounds plausible in the beginning, but words do not exist independently.

To illustrate how things can go wrong, let's try to prove that English is a Semitic language. Suppose that the source material we have is this sentence:

"A baker brought a bushel of wheat to the mill."

Now let's match it to Semitic roots as found on this list: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic_stems. Let's look for plausible substitutions now:

- "Baker" matches "bVkVr-", "first-born son". We have our anchor now. (V means any vowel).

- "Brought" looks plausibly close to "burāṯ-", "juniper" on our list. So far so good.

- "Bushel" is a good match with "b-š-l", "to be cooked"!

- "Wheat" does not have an exact match. It could be a loanword, for example.

- "Mill" looks like "m-r-r", "bitterness" if we assume lack of written L/R distinction. Again, juniper + cook + bitter is plausible, because juniper can be bitter.

- The meaning of particles will be inferred from the sentence structure.

Okay, let's take a look at our translation! We have "first-born son", "juniper", "cook", (wheat), "bitter". Pretty clear that (wheat) must be the name of a dish here. Therefore, the sentence can be translated as "A bitter juniper dish is being cooked for a first-born son". This even matches the context: the sentence was found in a granary, and it refers to food.

My point here is that with such a small sample size, we can extrapolate the data to mean absolutely anything. With no reference material, we cannot assess the correctness of any translation.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#179

Post by iwontberude »

ben_w wrote: post #47
iwontberude wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.

> Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense. No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date. To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from . To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession.

Actually it’s the flattening of achievement to be some guy, Claude or a combination of both when really it was neither.

Re: AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

#180

Post by petjuh »

peterfirefly wrote: post #146
_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.

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 (…

Ok, but Hurro-Urartian is an agglutinative language family that is an isolate and has nothing to do with Semitic.
Post reply on HN