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Could modern computers decipher hieroglyphics if we never found the Rosetta Stone? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by saywhatisabigw to c/[email protected]

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What if we never found the Rosetta Stone and could not read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Could computers or AI decipher them today?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably not. We can algorithmically show if something is likely to be writing, but actually understanding it is a very complicated process that involves a lot of social sciences inferences. An LLM using chain or tree of thought would probably be your best shot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think if you're trying to model completely agnostically on every language possible translating entire words and existing known pictograms to what they mean. Then there might be a slight chance that kind of deciphering part of it. Just because humans usually come back to similar symbols and maybe it can pick up on something that we can't. But it would be a long shot to be sure

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The question specified present technology, which is how I answered. I'd guess that an algorithm that can find a reasonable interpretation of any corpus of text in a reasonable time period exists, it's just it hasn't been made.

For really small corpuses there might be more than one interpretation. The Voynich manuscript can probably only be read one way (or zero, but I've seen convincing arguments for 1).