Thousands of ancient cuneiform tablets remain untranslated. A team of researchers have developed an AI to unlock their secrets.

Researchers have unearthed hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, but many remain untranslated. Translating an ancient language is a time-intensive process, and only a few hundred experts are qualified to perform it. A recent study describes a new AI that produces high-quality translations of ancient texts.

    • ribboo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      It’s pretty freaking great at stuff like that though. We use a custom programming language at work, there are similarities with Haskell and others, but also many differences.

      We had a little game where a colleague had put together some team-exercises. He had encrypted a message in base64 and therein written instructions for code, in our custom language that when run gave you an output.

      ChatGPT managed to print out the, 100% non random output, and 100% stuff that’s never been anywhere on the internet, without trouble.

      • dandelo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Google’s DeepMind was able to teach itself Indonesian without being directly trained on how to do so. Ancient Sumerian doesn’t seem too far fetched, all things considered!