Artificial intelligence to help historical discoveries: DeepMind

Artificial intelligence helps us in many areas of our lives. Thanks to DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company that Google acquired in 2014, archaeologists will now be able to better understand the past. Because the Ithaca software developed by DeepMind will be able to complete the missing texts of a historical inscription, predict when the inscription was written and its geographical origin.

DeepMind can fill in the gaps in historical texts thanks to its new software

Ithaca software, developed by DeepMind, was created by historian and machine learning expert Thea Sommerschield and her team. “Ithaca was designed as a complementary tool to assist historians,” Sommerschield said in a statement. Thanks to Ithaca, it is possible to predict where and when each of the historical texts was written, and what the gaps in the texts might be.

The scientists who created DeepMind’s Ithaca software say it will be 62 percent accurate when restoring letters in damaged texts and 71 percent when finding their geographic origin.

While these are promising statistics, Ithaca’s recommendations are based on data collected through traditional archaeological methods. That is, the ability to work independently of human expertise is currently absent.