Google Translate-like AI tool can interpret Cuneiform, a 5000-year-old writing system!
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has taken the world by storm. The emergence of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard has had a profound impact on how we access and process information, with everything now available with just a prompt and click. While these amazing tools can help us in accomplishing simple tasks in our daily lives, they can also help uncover the secrets of the past. A new and groundbreaking AI project, by a team of archaeologists and computer scientists from Israel, aims to do exactly that by translating a nearly 5000-year-old writing system into English in a manner of seconds, meaning it is a supercharged version of Google Translate!
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script with characteristic wedge-shaped impressions that is over 5000 years old. It was in use from the bronze age to the common era, a period that last nearly 3000 years but hasn't been used in 2000 years. There are millions of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform in museums, libraries, and galleries today. However, due to the extremely low number of Akkadian readers, translating them into understandable language today has been difficult, but not anymore.
The Google Translate-like tool was developed as a thesis project at Tel Aviv University. In a research published in the peer-reviewed PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, Gai Gutherz, a computer scientist who was part of the team that developed the program said, “What's so amazing about it is that I don't need to understand Akkadian at all to translate [a tablet] and get what's behind the cuneiform. I can just use the algorithm to understand and discover what the past has to say.”
According to the research, the AI tool uses a mathematical formula known as Neural Machine
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