Artificial Intelligence Can Decipher Ancient Records
AI technology has decoded most of the texts written on parchment dating back to the 8th century. Up to now, the ancient texts are carefully preserved, only 1/10 of them have been successfully deciphered by humans.
The library of the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland is home to some 160,000 volumes of literary and historical manuscripts dating back to the 8th century. All are handwritten on parchment and in languages rarely spoken in modern times
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Recently, scientists from the University of Notre Dame are developing an artificial network to translate complex ancient handwriting based on human perception. “We are dealing with historical documents that go back centuries and are in languages like Latin,” said a representative from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Notre Dame.
Scientists expect that soon, artificial intelligence can translate the full text of the Rohonc law, which is known as one of the world’s famous ancient books containing many mysteries.
Scheirer’s team studied digitized Latin manuscripts. This version was written by the scribes at St. Gall in the 9th century.
Readers entered their manual transcriptions into a specially designed software interface. The team then measured the reaction time during transcription to see which words, characters, and passages were easy or difficult.
However, this approach still faces many challenges. His team is working to improve the accuracy of the transcripts, especially in the case of damaged or incomplete documents. At the same time, calculating other aspects when the record page can confuse the system.
The good news is that the team has successfully adapted the program to transcribe Ethiopian texts. Then adapt it to a language with a completely different character set. This is supposed to be the first step in developing a program that can transcribe and translate information for users.
Artificial intelligence is the “thinking” of machines, in which the devices will mimic the natural way of thinking of humans to solve problems. In the modern world, AI is one of the key factors. From a seemingly distant concept, artificial intelligence step by step comes into life, realizing the dream of machines capable of thinking like humans.
